Brendan Iribe, the CEO of Oculus between 2014 and 2016, says he didn’t think the 3DoF Oculus Go headset was a good idea.
Iribe joined Oculus as CEO near the end of its Kickstarter, and was declared a co-founder alongside Palmer Luckey, Nate Mitchell, and Michael Antonov. Iribe held the CEO title through the launch of the Oculus Rift until just after the Touch controllers shipped, when he stepped down to lead the Rift PC VR teams.
It has been widely reported that in this era there were fierce debates within Oculus as to how much to focus on PC VR versus standalone, and what the minimum capability set for VR should be.
3DOF VR was the wrong off-ramp. It was fine for Rift DK1, but the focus of Rift and Quest on 6DOF with Touch controllers was the right direction.
— Brendan Iribe (@brendaniribe) May 12, 2025
Iribe was replaced as head of Oculus by Hugo Barra, a former Xiaomi VP. Nine months later the company announced Oculus Go, a $200 standalone headset manufactured by Xiaomi, which was also sold in China as Xiaomi Mi VR.
Shipped in 2018, Oculus Go was Facebook’s first standalone headset but lacked any kind of cameras or other positional tracking system. It was 3DoF, meaning it could only track the rotation of your head, not the position. If you leaned, the entire world moved with you, as if it was attached to your head. Go’s simple laser-pointer remote was 3DoF too, meaning it had a fixed position in space and could only rotate, not directly interact with virtual content.
Despite the low price and a celebrity marketing campaign, these critical limitations meant Go failed to reach anywhere near the success that those within Oculus who did believe in it had hoped. While $200 was already lower than any other fully-featured VR headset to date, Go was even sold at $180 at Black Friday and Christmas, and cut to $150 within two years on the market.
Last year, Iribe’s successor Hugo Barra himself admitted that Go “had extremely low retention”, and that most buyers “completely abandoned the headset after a few weeks”. Barra left Facebook in 2021 and called Oculus Go “the biggest product failure I’ve ever been associated with”.
Clearly, Brendan Iribe was right.
Ian Hamilton
After just over two years on the market, Facebook stopped selling Oculus Go and vowed to never ship another 3DoF VR product again, a promise which Meta has kept.
Brendan Iribe left Facebook five months after the release of Oculus Go, and TechCrunch reported that this decision was related to superiors cancelling the Oculus Rift 2 he wanted to ship in favor of the cheaper Lenovo-designed Rift S. While Iribe has praised Oculus Quest, it’s clear his interest was in high-end PC VR, not the standalone approach Meta has focused on instead.
