Description
Oculus is a brand of Facebook Technologies, LLC (formerly known as Oculus VR, LLC), a subsidiary of Facebook Inc. The division produces virtual reality headsets, including the Oculus Rift and Oculus Quest lines.
In July 2012, Palmer Luckey, Brendan Iribe, Michael Antonov and Nate Mitchell founded Oculus VR in Irvine, California. In April 2012, Luckey announced the Rift, a virtual reality headset designed for video gaming, and launched a Kickstarter campaign in August to make virtual reality headsets available to developers. The campaign proved successful and raised $2.4 million, ten times the original goal of $250,000. Two pre-production models were released to developers; the Oculus VR DK1 (Development Kit 1) and Oculus VR DK2 (Development Kit 2).
In March 2014, Facebook, Inc. acquired Oculus for US$2.3 billion in cash and stock. Shortly afterwards, Oculus VR moved to Menlo Park, where Facebook headquarters are.
In 2015, Oculus VR acquired Surreal Vision, a British startup focused on 3D reconstruction and mixed reality, stating that it could be possible for Oculus to develop products with the concept of telepresence.
In November 2015, the company partnered with Samsung to develop the Samsung Gear VR for the Samsung Galaxy smartphones. Zuckerberg has stated he would like to get 1 billion virtual reality headsets into consumers' hands.
On March 28, 2016, the company released the first consumer headset, Oculus Rift CV1, with an all-new design incorporating specialized VR displays, positional audio, and infrared tracking system.
In August 2020, Oculus Connect was renamed "Facebook Connect" and Facebook's VR and AR team was renamed "Facebook Reality Labs". In October 2020, Oculus released the Oculus Quest 2.
