Here’s everything you need to know about Oculus

The past few years have been great for content creators and every day, they are looking for ways to make their work more interactive and enjoyable for viewers and consumers and one of the technologies that are set to usher in a new dimension to content creation and interaction is Virtual Reality (VR). We have had some VR headsets and devices in the market for some time now and while the technology is still in its nascent stage, brands all over the world are pooling considerable resources towards developing the technology, and it’s not far away when we get some proper mainstream VR devices.

One such company that is working completely towards leveraging and developing VR is Oculus. For those of you who don’t know, Oculus is a division of Meta Platforms, that deals exclusively with VR and VR-related hardware. Meta Platforms is nothing but the renamed Facebook Inc. and is basically an amalgamation of the various social media platforms that come under the Facebook brand, including Facebook itself, Instagram, Whatsapp, and Oculus.

 

 

In July 2012, Palmer Luckey, Brendan Iribe, Michael Antonov, and Nate Mitchell founded Oculus VR in Irvine, California. In April 2012, Luckey announced the Rift, a virtual reality headset designed for video gaming, and launched a Kickstarter campaign in August to make virtual reality headsets available to developers. The campaign proved successful and raised $2.4 million, ten times the original goal of $250,000. Two pre-production models were released to developers.

The Oculus Rift was a great success among developers and it caught the eye of Facebook and in March 2014, Facebook, Inc. acquired Oculus for $2.3 billion in cash and stock. Soon afterward, Oculus VR moved to Menlo Park, as with Facebook. The company partnered with Samsung Electronics to release the Gear VR for smartphones in 2015. In March 2016, Oculus released the first consumer version of the Rift headset. In 2017, the company released a standalone mobile headset known as Oculus Go, produced by Xiaomi.

 

 

Currently, Oculus is working on integrating its VR headsets with Facebook’s social media interactions in order to give users a never-before-seen interactive experience. The testing is currently underway and we should be seeing some sort of update very soon. The only catch here is that by the time we actually get a full-fledged social media-optimized VR headset, the brand Oculus will no longer exist. That’s because from 2022, Meta will be retiring the Oculus name in favor of something of its own making, and while the core team will predominantly remain the same, the brand will be renamed.

If you are interested in VR and VR-related hardware, and you want to follow Oculus, you can give their website a visit and get a deeper understanding of what the brand is all about.