As of earlier this month, the Oculus is now a part of Facebook Technologies LLC. The company started back in 2012 by Palmer Luckey, Brendan Iribe, Nate Mitchell and others. It is an effort to have Facebook handle all of the hardware for them and also Portal Inc. This diagram will explain.
According to Facebook, it was official as of September 2018, but news is just now breaking regarding the deal, even though the two companies have been working together for some time now.
Facebook issued the following statement last week:
“This is an update to the legal name and as you said, 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.”
Facebook’s CFO expects earnings to be up 40%-50% in the year of 2019, and he listed AR and VR as two of the main reasons.
As most could see the future of this coming, we will show you a rough outline of this all happening and the breakdown of it over the last few years.
- Mid 2016: ‘Oculus from Facebook’ branding introduced.
- Late 2016: Facebook removes CEO role from Oculus and announces the hiring of Hugo Barra in early 2017 to run VR efforts.
- April 2017: Facebook becomes the default account system when setting up an Oculus headset.
- May 2018: Oculus Research is rebranded as ‘Facebook Reality Labs’.
- September 2018: Oculus becomes a division of Facebook Technologies.
Facebook has a history of leaving the companies they acquire to themselves and letting them be their own entities, so why would they treat VR any different? Zuckerberg sees VR and AR as Facebook’s main future, so he wants a tighter control. With that being said, its very important to note that no changes have been made to Oculus.
