Meta CTO initially favored Rift PC VR, not standalone VR

According to reports,MetaAccording to reports, Meta CTO Andrew Bosworth once advocated canceling the Oculus standalone headset project and continuing to support the PC-based Rift virtual reality device. According to The Information's Sylvia Varnum-Oregan, citing former employees, Bosworth's career path began with building Facebook's news feed, then headed mobile advertising, and since 2017 led augmented reality/virtual reality department.

The report noted that when Bosworth took over at Oculus, the division was "in a state of disarray," with heated debate between teams focusing on the PC-based Rift headset and building a wireless standalone headset. Bosworth allegedly backed the PC-based team and argued that Facebook should terminate the "standalone VR project," but Mark Zuckerberg dismissed his opinion and decided to try both.

A year later, Oculus released its first standalone headset, the Quest. However, despite a mere $200 price tag and a celebrity marketing campaign, the lack of location tracking and an underlying laser pointer remote prevents the Quest from running campaign content that draws people into virtual reality. Worse, its fragmented software also fails to deliver the collective viewing of media that its marketing promises.

A year later, however, Facebook launched the Oculus Quest, a headset that redefined virtual reality and laid the groundwork for the Quest 2, arguably the first mainstream VR headset. Combining the room-scale movement and tracked controller features of the Rift+Touch while retaining the standalone wireless nature of the Go, Quest proves that the beauty of virtual reality lies in direct interaction with the virtual world and doesn't necessarily require high-fidelity graphics. Standalone VR is a good idea after all, it just needs to have the appropriate minimum functional requirements.

Bosworth's arguments against standalone headsets in favor of the PC-based Rift go against the prevailing view that Facebook executives have unanimously backed long-term plans to turn PC-centric startup Oculus into a mobile division.

In fact, back in the early days of Oculus, the biggest proponent of mobile standalone VR was John Carmack. In 2012, before officially joining the company, Carmack described his goal of using "mobile phone hardware" and cameras for location tracking, without any wires. In 2013, during his tenure as Oculus' CTO, Carmack even said that the ideal headset would run a version of Android.

These days, Meta is fully focused on its Quest helmets. The company officially announced the end of the Rift series when it released Quest 2, turning PC virtual reality into a standalone software feature rather than a stand-alone headset product. But if The Information's report is accurate, the VR market could have a very different trajectory.