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Although acquired by Facebook in 2014, it’s only now that Oculus VR LLC has been fully absorbed into the megacorp social media platform.
Facebook bought Oculus for $2 billion in 2014. "We got the deal done with Facebook in three days. That’s how accelerated it was," co-founder Brendan Iribe said at the time. "We never intended to sell the company. We were building this thing and going along this path." Now, the virtual reality company sits within "Facebook Technologies LLC", a Facebook hardware subsidiary that includes Portal, Facebook’s new video calling displays. The change "went into effect" in September, which is around the same time as Iribe parted ways with Facebook.
"This is an update to the legal name," Facebook said in a statement to UploadVR (thanks, GamesIndustry.biz). "Oculus remains a division of Facebook Technologies. There’s no change or impact on the Oculus brand or business. This update gives us a single legal entity that can support multiple Facebook technology and hardware products, including Portal and Oculus. It went into effect in September, ahead of the Portal launch."
Iribe has now also parted ways with parent company, Facebook. Iribe – who founded Oculus in 2012 with Michael Antonov, Palmer Luckey, and Nate Mitchell – had been leading Oculus’ PC VR team, and is thought to have resigned when Facebook cancelled the "Rift 2" project, causing "fundamentally different views on the future of Oculus that grew deeper over time" that ultimately prompted Iribe’s departure.
A report earlier this year said that consumer content and the apps market for AR and VR combined hit $3.2bn last year, giving a year-on-year growth of 72 per cent. $2bn of that came from apps with AR features – driven by "the high-profile releases of Apple’s ARKit and Google’s ARCore SDKs that spurred interest in AR apps".
