Oculus Co-founder is Leaving Facebook After Cancellation of 'Rift 2' Headset (techcrunch.com)

Brendan Iribe, the co-founder and former CEO of Oculus, announced today that he is leaving Facebook. From a report: Iribe is leaving Facebook following some internal shake-ups in the company's virtual reality arm last week that saw the cancellation of the company's next generation "Rift 2" PC-powered virtual reality headset, which he had been leading development of, a source close to the matter told TechCrunch. Iribe and the Facebook executive team had "fundamentally different views on the future of Oculus that grew deeper over time," and Iribe wasn't interested in a "race to the bottom" in terms of performance, we are told.

Comments

What's that word

[SuperKendall]

Sounds like there's some kind of large separation between him and Facebook, a, what's that word... nope lost it.

Re:What's that word

[Luckyo]

No, it means that high performance VR loses as a whole. Oculus, for all its problems, funded a lot of software development for high performance VR. With them refocusing on crippled low power VR instead, that's even less resources in the niche of high performance VR, and it's a niche that is already suffering severely from lack of software.

Re: What's that word

[tysonedwards]

Isnâ(TM)t Microsoftâ(TM)s WMR a viable competitor in the high end VR space, even including a number of benefits that ease adoption as compared to the incumbent Occulus and HTC offerings, like inside out tracking and high resolution screens?

Re:What's that word

[HornWumpus]

It means they got a good look at a 2080 GPU and cold harsh reality sank in.

A single 2080 can't drive a 4K HDR at 90Hz, so if they built the obvious upgrade for a Rift, it was going to render at lower resolution anyhow, for _years_.

Asking users to install two 1k$ graphics cards takes the whole deal out of mass market. Makes money only for Nvidia. Will still likely only render relatively simple scenes.

Someone will succeed on small scale. Price will be kilobucks.

Porn is key, as with any new media. Cheap VR is good enough for VR video.

Re:What's that word

[rtb61]

Play typical PC game, lean back in recliner, computer on table over chair, TV streaming ,music in background, pretty view in windows, snacks and hot cocoa in reach, really comfortable. Virtual reality best played standing up, no chair, closed off from music and can't see pleasant view, scattered snacks and hot cocoa spilled everywhere, not very fucking comfortable at all. Now exactly who are you selling virtual reality, surely it could not be computer gamers like me. Sure fun some of the time for a short while but seriously, maybe, just maybe represent 10% of your gaming time.

So go for a nice stroll, listening to tunes for that 10%, really enjoy that healthy pleasantness or play VR, even though I've already had my fill of gaming. The problem with VR gaming, is that it is not very comfortable, sure if you want to train soldiers and police et at, if they can run with a remote headset in an obstruction matched to vision environment so they do not run into things by accident but for you typical chubby gamer, yeah, nahhh.

VR glasses, need to be compact enough to be able to hook into a phone and give phone users a 125" screen in their pocket, with zero motion feedback because it makes most people nauseous and some extremely so, beyond that more fantasy than reality. Virtual gladiator sports, with all the physical effort, lots and lots of physical effort but no carnage ie VR gyms but that makes it a very limited market.

Re: What's that word

[mobby_6kl]

Absolutely. Samsung just launched an updated Odyssey+ which isn't a huge upgrade in terms of specs but could be significantly better in practice thanks to better comfort and especially the anti-SDE screen if it actually works. Oculus/Vive fanboys will try to claim that the limited volume of hand tracking is a dealbreaker but outside of a few specific games it's a good tradeoff and doesn't cause any issues.

If a proper gen 2 adds two more cameras, wider FOV and eye tracking, they'd have a serious chance of overtaking all the mainstream competitors. In the end, MS is the only company that actually cares about desktop PC as a platform for all of this, Oculus can keep pushing mobile with their walled gardens and Valve can just keep valving off their steam cash.

Re: What's that word

[Luckyo]

The deal breaker is the fact that the visual quality is awful, because of phone grade hardware. When you have powerful PC grade hardware sucking up hundreds of watts of power still being barely sufficient for fairly low quality 3d imaging, low power version is just terrible.

Which is why all those "make your phone into VR device" addons sold really well, got played with for a few days and are now overwhelmingly collecting dust or are in the trash bin. Hardware sells because it's really cheap and makes promises it cannot meet due to utter lack of power.

Re: Should have thought of that before selling to

[Anonymous Coward]

The Zuck only wanted the technology platform as a means to program zombies and NPCs with more propaganda beyond the FB app txt app. Enhanced gaming?? Yeah, no, that's someone else's chicken to fuck. Not having it at FB

I hope...

[JustNiz]

I'l bet right now that Iribe will imminently announce his own VR company, with Karmack at the technical reins, with every intention to release producs that will blow the fuck out of Facebook and their crappy VR strategy.

I've never been a fan of Oculus.. I personally think they/their products are underservedly overrated by a bunch of fanbois, as the Rift is actually very mediocre compared to even the Vive, especially its roomscale tracking solution. That said I hated seeing one of the largest VR companies end up just making more anemic GearVR clones such as the Oculus Go and whetever else Zuckerberg seems to want.

More competition and more innovation in the VR sector is better for everyone. I'm very much looking forward to attending a Pimax backer meeting in LA tomorrow and trying the 5K+ and 8K. How is it that a small Chinese company can be coming out with groundbreaking stuff, when HTC and Oculus are both at best doing low-risk little iterative improvements?

Re:I hope...

[JustNiz]

I'm a Pimax 8K backer, input res is 2560x1440 per eye. (it get upscaled to native 4k per eye by the headset hardware)

Tests have shown that a last gen GPU (gtx1070) is bare minimum. 1080ti is more realistic. Current gen 2080ti (cost is about $1200) is more than fine.

Yeah you need to be able to pay to play, but that's how it is with most hobbies. Actually, $1200 is pocket money compared to maximum possible expenditure in most of my other hobbies.