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

Posted by msmash on from the end-of-road dept.

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.

4 of 81 comments (clear)

  1. What's that word by SuperKendall · · Score: 5, Funny

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

    --
    "There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
    1. Re:What's that word by Luckyo · · Score: 3, Insightful

      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.

    2. Re:What's that word by HornWumpus · · Score: 3, Insightful

      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.

      --
      John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
  2. I hope... by JustNiz · · Score: 3, Interesting

    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?