Zuckerberg's dream of 1 billion users is shattered! Oculus Go is canceled, but Facebook has seen the future of VR

Author | Li Shuaifei

In 2018, at the Oculus Connect 4 developer conference, Facebook CEO Mark Zurkberg said that he wanted to allow 1 billion people to enter the world of VR - to this end, Facebook released an entry-level all-in-one VR machine, Oculus Go.

However, in 2020, VR is still a niche industry.

Fortunately, Facebook has never given up and has been promoting the development of VR in its own way. At present, its exploration of VR hardware mainly adopts a two-pronged approach: one is the host VR represented by Oculus Rift, and the other is the VR all-in-one machine, represented by Oculus Go and Oculus Quest.

However, Oculus Go is about to be phased out.

On June 23, Facebook announced that Oculus Go would no longer be shipped.

Facebook stated in its official blog that it will no longer release any 3D of VR products, and will therefore terminate the sales of Oculus Go at the end of 2020 in order to focus more on improving Quest and Rift.

However, although Oculus Go will be discontinued soon, existing users of Oculus Go will not be affected in any way, and Facebook will continue to provide software services to Oculus Go users, including bug fixes and security patches, until 2022.

Facebook also said that after December 4, 2020, it will no longer accept new Oculus Go apps and app updates.

Oculus Go is Facebook's first standalone VR headset. It was unveiled as early as October 2017 at the Oculus Connect 4 developer conference, but it was not officially released at the time.

The product was not officially released until the Facebook F8 conference in early May 2018.

From a hardware perspective, Oculus Go is equipped with a Qualcomm Snapdragon 821 quad-core chip and a "fast-switch LCD" screen with a resolution of 2560 x 1440. It has a better display effect than an OLED screen, can help reduce the screen door effect, and has a larger field of view.

At the same time, Oculus Go has built-in stereo sound, so users do not need to wear separate headphones, and the microphone is also built into the headband.

In terms of interaction, Oculus Go supports 3Dof (three degrees of freedom) head and hand tracking, which is a bit weak compared to some all-in-one VR devices that support 6Dof (six degrees of freedom) head and hand tracking.

Of course, considering that it is a consumer-oriented product, the price of Oculus Go is not high. It is priced at US$199 in the United States, which is a very affordable price.

It is worth mentioning that in January 2018, during CES 2018, Xiaomi and Oculus jointly announced that the two parties will jointly launch VR all-in-one products: Xiaomi VR all-in-one and Oculus Go - it is generally believed that these two products are actually versions of the same product in different markets.

Xiaomi VR all-in-one was officially released at the end of May 2018, priced at 1,499 yuan.

To some extent, Oculus Go can only be regarded as a transitional product. Although its price is low enough, the experience is not enough to represent the standard level of all-in-one VR devices, especially the lack of 6Dof, which reduces its immersiveness.

Despite this, by July 2019, Oculus Go had sold 2 million units thanks to its low price.

Looking back now, the launch of Oculus Go seems more like a prelude to Oculus Quest.

Oculus Quest was officially unveiled at the Oculus Connect 5 conference in September 2018. It looks a bit like Oculus Go, but in fact, it is much more powerful.

In fact, Oculus Quest is a revolutionary improvement over Oculus Go.

First of all, its biggest highlight is that the 6DoF gaming experience that was originally unique to PC VR has been brought to the mobile terminal - the all-in-one VR device.

Compared with 3DoF which only supports rotation angle freedom, the 6DoF supported by Oculus Quest adds three translational degrees of freedom (up and down, front and back, left and right), which makes people's movement in virtual space closer to the real world (free to walk), while at the same time getting rid of the constraints of cables.

According to Chris Pruett, head of Oculus ecosystem, at the GDC 2019 conference, the optimal play area for Oculus Quest is about 58 square meters.

In addition, Oculus Quest uses the new Oculus Insight technology, with a camera installed at each corner of the device to achieve perception of space and user movements; in other words, it uses inside-out tracking technology, which is significantly different from the outside-in used by PC VR.

In other words, there is no need for any sensors around the room to sense the user's environment and exact location.

In addition, Oculus Quest uses a Qualcomm Snapdragon 835 processor; in terms of audio, it does not have headphones, but instead uses 3D audio technology similar to Oculus Go, and there are also improvements in the controller.

After Leifeng.com communicated with many industry insiders, everyone agreed that the emergence of Oculus Quest means that the hardware has basically passed the "passing line".

It is worth mentioning that at the beginning of its release, Facebook stated that Oculus Quest will be able to use more than 50 games that were previously only available on Oculus Rift - now there are more than 120 games.

Oculus Quest is priced at $399 and was officially shipped on May 21, 2019. Its shipments in the second quarter of that year exceeded 200,000 units, and its annual shipments exceeded one million units. To date, the 64GB version is still out of stock on the official website.

It is worth mentioning that on the first anniversary of Oculus Quest’s shipment, Facebook also announced that its total content revenue has exceeded US$100 million. This is the product with the fastest content revenue of over US$100 million for a single hardware product.

Regarding Oculus Quest, Zu Kunlun, vice president of Pico, said in an interview with Leifeng.com:

But it is a bit regrettable that Oculus Quest is absent in the Chinese market.

Regarding the relationship between Oculus Go and Oculus Quest, Facebook said:

It can be seen that although Oculus Go is a transitional product, it also paves the way for Oculus Quest.

Facebook also said that everything was made very clear through the voice of the community:

The exit of Oculus Go from the stage of history, in a sense, also shows that VR devices are destined to be difficult to become a mass consumer product like smartphones, and VR devices may also find it difficult to achieve what Facebook CEO Zuckerberg wants: to reach 1 billion users.

But this may not be a regret. After all, after difficult exploration, the future of VR has become clearer.