An official Oculus Rift 2 headset was cancelled shortly before it went into production, says Oculus founder and Rift inventor, Palmer Luckey.
Luckey claimed as much in a tweet yesterday, responding to UploadVR’s report that Facebook would not be replenishing stock for the Oculus Rift S. The engineer, who departed Facebook in 2017, said he was “Imagining a world where Rift 2 was not cancelled shortly before going into production and then cancelled again in favor of a much lower spec Lenovo rebadge.”
Oculus Rift 2 Cancelled In Favor Of Rift S
What a bummer. Imagining a world where Rift 2 was not cancelled shortly before going into production and then cancelled again in favor of a much lower spec Lenovo rebadge…https://t.co/4bsWOoPbTp
— Palmer Luckey (@PalmerLuckey) April 6, 2021
Luckey’s tweet matches up with a TechCrunch report from 2018 that claimed Facebook had cancelled a full Rift 2 headset, codenamed Caspar, which lead to the departure of former Oculus CEO, Brendan Iribe. The following year, a new book from Blake Harris made mention of two other potential Rift follow-ups, Tuzi and Venice, that never made it off the ground.
The “lower spec” headset Luckey is referring to is the Rift S, which was seen as more of a small upgrade to the first Rift when it launched alongside the original Oculus Quest in 2019 with a bump in screen resolution and a switch to inside-out tracking. A full-bodied Rift 2 would have likely included more significant technical upgrades and perhaps new features. Ahead of Rift S’s launch, Facebook’s Jason Rubin himself said that a full Rift 2 would “need to include radical new tech.”
We now know, however, that that will never happen. At Facebook Connect last year the company announced the Oculus Quest 2 and, in the process, confirmed it would be winding down sales of the Rift S, which it confirmed would be its last PC-only VR headset.
It’s becoming increasingly clear why Facebook made this move. Last week we reported that the Quest 2, having been on sale for around five months now, has already outsold every other Oculus headset — the Rift, Rift S, Go and Quest — combined.
What do you think of Oculus Rift 2 being cancelled? Let us know in the comments below!
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