Undeterred, though, Zuck went ahead with today's announcement anyway, confirming that Facebook's $200 standalone VR headset will be hitting the market soon, and that it will be called the Oculus Go. So, what exactly is Oculus Go? It turns out that nobody really knows.
TechCrunch attempted to explain:
Oculus was more than a little vague in how they portrayed the device, so I won’t assume too much, but there’s little doubt that the headset will be less powerful as a standalone than what the Rift can currently handle. That may end up disappointing die-hards, but subtle movements of the high-end market away from being tethered to a PC is going to do Facebook a lot of favors in terms of platform sustainability and leaving the early-adopter niche.
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Oculus Go will save Facebook from having to build complex partnerships with smartphone manufacturers that are 100x easier for Google to gain through Android anyway. Samsung is Oculus’s only friend when it comes to mobile VR, and this year the company put both of its flagship smartphones on Google Daydream, as well. This move could likely signal a future where Oculus moves away from smartphone mobile VR as they shift to building their own platforms and letting Google dominate VR on Android, which was a bit of an inevitability anyway.
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The thing is, there’s been this misconception that Valve or Samsung or Microsoft or Sony are Oculus’s competitors, when the fact is that their main competitor is irrelevancy.TechCrunch buried the lede a bit in their piece, as far as I'm concerned, so I've reversed the sequence of these excerpts, to start with a description of what Oculus Go is, proceed to a description of what it will actually do, and end with what it, to me, The Point.
As I've said before, the problem with VR isn't so much its price point, as its perceived value for money. Consumers would have been willing to buy VR headsets at $600 a pop if they were actually useful, i.e. if they actually enabled some new category of experience that wasn't possible without the tech. VR doesn't do that, though, and it has a bunch of other problems besides (simulation sickness, anyone?), so consumers still aren't buying, at any price.
Oculus Go doesn't appear to solve any of these problems; the Oculus Go announcement didn't show us any new class of VR activity that people will actually want to do. With VR still providing only qualitative enhancements of experiences that can be had without VR (rather than enabling quantitatively different experiences that would require a VR headset to make them possible), I suspect that it's still a non-starter. Consumers weren't interested at $600, and there's not much evidence that they're all that interested at $400, so why is $200 suddenly the magic number, here? Especially with Microsoft-backed VR headsets entering the market at only $300, and forecast (by some, anyway) to outsell the Rift by two to one, right out of the gate?
And then there's the other problem, i.e. that Social VR still isn't a thing, so marrying the Oculus brand (the opposite of a social experience) to the Facebook brand (which is very much all about social media) appears to be about as obvious and natural a fit as Google Plus was, back when Google briefly tried (and quickly failed) to be Facebook.
BTW, that Summer of Rift "temporary" price for Oculus Rift? It's a permanent markdown now. Surprise! Cue HTC following suit in 3... 2... 1...
TechCrunch's article summed up the State of Oculus thusly:
Facebook bought Oculus VR more than three years ago and the ride since has been pretty bumpy. Scandals, product delays, executive overhauls and expensive lawsuits have all partially defined the company’s VR ambitions thus far. What comes next is anyone’s guess, but for Facebook it will finally be their choice to make.Except that it isn't, of course. It's consumers' choice to make. Facebook it just hoping that some significant percentage of their 2B or so users will love the idea of a walled-garden, Facebook-centric VR experience enough to drop $200 a FacebookVR headset (because, let's face it, that's what Oculus Go actually will be). Oculus Go is a standalone version of a product in which consumers are largely not interested, tied to a social media platform that's literally the polar opposite of the VR experience anyway, and sold by a company that couldn't even tease the announcement event without creating a shit storm. What could possibly go wrong?