Facebook VR delayed Update

Facebook’s  virtual reality arm may soon find itself in the

unfamiliar position of playing catch-up with hardware

Competitors.

Last week, TechCrunch reported that Oculus co-founder

Brendan Iribe had decided to leave Facebook partially

due to his “fundamentally different views on the future of

Oculus”  and decisions surrounding the cancellation of a

next-generation “Rift 2” project.

The company’s prototype “Rift 2” device, codenamed

Caspar, was a “complete redesign” of the original Rift

eadset, a source familiar with the matter tells us. Its

cancellation signified an interest by Facebook leadership

to focus on more accessible improvements to the core

Rift experience that wouldn’t require the latest PC hardware

to function. Iribe did not agree with the direction, with a

source telling us that he was specifically not interested in

“offering compromised experiences that provided short-

term user growth but sacrificed on comfort and performance.”

In the wake of the overhaul’s cancellation, the company will

be pursuing a more modest product update — possibly

called the “Rift S” — to be released as early as next year,

which makes minor upgrades to the device’s display

resolution while more notably getting rid of the external

sensor-tracking system, sources tell us. Instead, the headset

will utilize the integrated “inside-out” Insight tracking system,

which is core to Facebook’s recently announced Oculus Quest

standalone headset.

The “Constellation” tracking system on the current-generation

Rift offers precise accuracy thanks to the static external

sensors that track the headset and Touch controllers. While

the Insight system would likely offer users a much more

simplified setup process, a clear pain point of the first-generation

product, “inside-out” tracking systems have greater limitations

when it comes to the lighting conditions they work in and are

generally less accurate than systems with external trackers.