New World Notes: Oculus Co-Founder Who Wanted to Build a "Billion Person Virtual World" Departs Facebook, Decrying Company's "Race to the Bottom" With Standalone Headsets

Monday, October 22, 2018

Oculus Co-Founder Who Wanted to Build a "Billion Person Virtual World" Departs Facebook, Decrying Company's "Race to the Bottom" With Standalone Headsets

TechCrunch's Lucas Matney reports that Oculus co-founder Brendan Iribe, who once advocated creating a billion user MMO for virtual reality, i.e. the Metaverse, is leaving the company with a billion+ userbase, i.e. Facebook:

Iribe is leaving Facebook following some internal shake-ups at 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.

By "bottom" he's presumably referencing the standalone Oculus Go and the recently-announced $399 Oculus Quest standalone headset. The irony is, the only way there's any real chance of achieving an MMO where hundreds of thousands of people (let alone a billion) can be together in VR is through low-priced standalone headsets. But maybe he's hoping to work for/found a new company that's more specifically designed to deploy such an MMO?

Upload VR's Ian Hamilton wonders if the next Oculus shoe to drop is the departure of its CTO John Carmack:

I’d love a comment from @ID_AA_Carmack saying whether or not he’s planning to stay at Facebook past the launch of Oculus Quest. The interview I’ve been after boils down to that singular question.
— Ian Hamilton (@hmltn) October 22, 2018