Meta Is Axing Oculus, But There's Good News Too

Earlier today, Facebook revealed that it's changing its name. Facebook, the corporation, will now be known as Meta. While Meta will continue to offer separate brands like Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp, the company will no longer share its name with its most popular app offering. As it turns out, this restructuring isn't just changing things at the corporate level, as Meta will also be retiring the Oculus brand.

Oculus, of course, is one of the biggest names in virtual reality, so this is a big move by Meta. In a post to his Facebook account today, Andrew Bosworth, Meta's VP of AR/VR, revealed that the Oculus brand is going away, saying Meta wants to ensure that Quest is seen as a Meta product, which means unified branding.

"For this reason, we're simplifying our brand architecture and shifting away from the Oculus brand," Bosworth wrote. "Starting in early 2022, you'll start to see the shift from Oculus Quest from Facebook to Meta Quest and Oculus App to Meta Quest App over time. We all have a strong attachment to the Oculus brand, and this was a difficult decision to make. While we're retiring the name, I can assure that the original Oculus vision remains deeply embedded in how Meta will continue to drive mass adoption for VR today."

Bosworth also made a more exciting announcement in his Facebook post, revealing that Meta will be removing the requirement to link Oculus headsets with Facebook accounts. Facebook started requiring that users link their headsets with a Facebook account with the Quest 2, and it was a decision that did not go over well with the Oculus faithful.

"As we've focused more on work, and as we've heard feedback from the VR community more broadly, we're working on new ways to log into Quest that won't require a Facebook account, landing sometime next year," Bosworth added. "This is one of our highest priority areas of work internally."

So, the Oculus brand will be going away, and while we're guessing that some out there have mixed feelings about that change, there's little doubt that the decision to stop forcing Facebook logins on Oculus hardware will be a welcomed one indeed. We'll let you know when these changes begin showing up in the real world, so stay tuned for more.