Facebook says that Oculus Rift S headsets “generally” will not be refilled as they disappear from store shelves, marking the end of the virtual reality system’s lifespan. As UploadVR reported yesterday, Facebook confirmed that “in general, as the channels run out, they will not be replaced going forward”. The headset connected to the PC is not available at the Oculus store and is sold out on retail platforms like Amazon and Walmart in the United States, except at third-party vendors.
Facebook announced last year that it would discontinue the Oculus Rift S in 2021. Although the headset was a successor to the Oculus Rift, it compromised features such as screen resolution and refresh rate, especially compared to state-of-the-art PC-based competitors. generation as the valve index. Meanwhile, Facebook shifted its focus to the independent Oculus Quest, a mobile headset that can also be connected to a desktop PC – making it a functional replacement for Rift S.
According to some reports, this strategy was a marked departure from Oculus’ previous plans. Oculus co-founder Brendan Iribe left the company in 2018, allegedly after Facebook canceled a state-of-the-art “Rift 2” headset. Palmer Luckey, founder of Oculus also deceased alluded to that rumor on Twitter today, saying he was “imagining a world where the Rift 2 would not be canceled just before it went into production and then canceled again in favor of a Lenovo rebadge with much lower specifications”. (The Oculus Rift S was produced in partnership with Lenovo.)
Switching to independent designs, however, has apparently worked well for Facebook so far. Facebook says last year’s Oculus Quest 2 outperformed all previous Oculus headsets combined. The device established Facebook as the dominant VR headset company at the price of giving up high-tech PC-based VR to competitors like Valve, HTC and HP. And Facebook has indicated that it is continuing the Quest line for the foreseeable future – with CEO Mark Zuckerberg saying that he is already imagining the “Quest 3 and 4” headphones.