An Oculus representative reaffirmed to us the words of Facebook CEO Mark Zuckberg from last month’s OC5 VR developer conference in saying today the company is still “planning a future version of Rift.”
Facebook focused a large part of its 5th VR developer conference on Oculus Quest, the forthcoming $400 standalone headset, but the company is still invested in PC-powered Rift games we don’t expect to ship until 2019 at the earliest. We know the company is also investing heavily into ideas like eye-tracking, foveated rendering and wide field of view optics for VR headsets that might require PCs to power them in the future. In addition, Oculus supports the VirtualLink connector included on the newest NVIDIA RTX graphics cards meant for next-generation VR headsets, though no headsets take advantage of the new connector yet.
#accurate https://t.co/JHUDD0DyBA
— Boz (@boztank) October 22, 2018
With news today that Oculus co-founder and former CEO Brendan Iribe is departing the company, a report from Techcrunch suggested that Iribe’s vision for Oculus differed from that of Facebook’s executives and referred to a cancelled “Rift 2” headset Iribe is said to have worked on.
Oculus co-founder Nate Mitchell, who has been leading the Rift and PC organization with Iribe, will remain in his position and lead the team.
A lot of questions today about the future of Rift — we’re still driving forward on the Rift/PC platform with new hardware, software, and content.
Lots of great stuff in the works. More to share in the months ahead.
— Nate Mitchell (@natemitchell) October 22, 2018
As a reminder, here’s what Zuckerberg said to developers at Oculus Connect 5 on September 26 this year, referencing a “new version” of the Rift.
