Meta's CTO Says He "Loved And Hoped To Keep" The Oculus Brand

Meta’s CTO says he “loved and hoped to keep” the Oculus brand.

“I hope that story gets told someday but suffice to say it isn’t what everyone thinks and it isn’t something I’m free to talk about just yet”, Andrew Bosworth said in a reply on X to discourse around Meta’s recent move to use “MR” to describe both MR and VR.

Meta, then Facebook, acquired Oculus in 2014 for almost $3 billion in total. For the first four years Oculus operated as a mostly independent startup, until in 2018 it became a division of Facebook, a year after Facebook fired the founder Palmer Luckey. In 2020, the division was renamed to Facebook Reality Labs, but the Oculus brand continued to be used.

In 2021, upon changing its name to Meta, the company announced that it would kill “Oculus”, rebranding its VR efforts to Meta Quest. Over the next year, almost every usage of “Oculus” was renamed, with the only remaining use of the brand being for Oculus Studios and Oculus Publishing.

Somewhat confusingly, last year Meta once again rebranded most of its VR/MR efforts from Meta Quest to Meta Horizon, with the Quest brand now only used to refer to first-party Meta headsets.

When rebranding from Oculus to Meta Quest in 2021, Bosworth claimed that the decision was taken “to make it clear that Quest is a Meta product”, stating that it was “a very difficult decision to make”.

Bosworth’s new comments, and specifically the reference to “statutes”, suggest that other legal-related reasons were at play. While he says he will “definitely tell the story some day”, for now he’s not disclosing the reasons.

These comments come six months after he publicly apologized to Palmer Luckey, the founder of Oculus, over comments he made earlier about his firing, stating that he was “misinformed” about the reasons. “I’m grateful for the impact you made at the company and in developing VR overall,” Bosworth said to Luckey at the time.

Meta CTO Apologizes To Palmer Luckey Over Firing Comments

Bosworth apologized to Luckey, while Zuckerberg gave him an Orion demo and said he hopes they “find ways to work together in the future”.

UploadVRDavid Heaney