Xiaomi reportedly fired Mi VR R&D team due to poor sales

According to foreign media reports, according to virtual reality enthusiast Anthony Weidilo's blog The Ghost Howls, Xiaomi has fired the entire Mi VR/Oculus Go development team, including 12 employees who were originally responsible for maintaining and developing the platform.

While Wei Di Luo said the news came from a "very reliable" source and was consistent with other information he had heard, he admitted that it was industry rumor because Xiaomi had not yet responded to a request for confirmation. Foreign media has independently contacted and is also waiting for the company's response.

While Facebook doesn't comment on the business decisions of its partners, it said it is still producing and selling the Oculus Go.

The report also stated that Xiaomi disbanded the Xiaomi VR team for several reasons, including "disappointing sales and usage", relatively low hardware profit margins, and relatively little content for the Xiaomi VR version of the device.

Foreign media said that Oculus Go and Mi VR had already reached a development dead end before the news was released. The two headsets were released last year as breakthrough alternatives to independent VR hardware, between high-end PC headsets and low-end smartphone-dependent VR accessories.

But to achieve an entry price of less than $200, they use older-generation smartphone components and three-degrees-of-freedom (3DoF) tracking, while Facebook has publicly developed a more advanced platform with newer components and six-degree-of-freedom tracking.

The device, called Oculus Quest, launched this year for $400, leading some to question whether the simpler, cheaper Oculus Go headset had a future.

In the past few years, virtual reality and augmented reality have been highly anticipated, but the market performance has been disappointing, and many technology companies have withdrawn from this field. The industry generally believes that virtual reality helmets still face some obstacles, such as the high price of helmet hardware, the user experience problems such as dizziness have not been solved, and there is still a lack of killer applications.