Facebook’s Oculus Quest to become Meta Quest: Oculus brand disappears

Following the communication operation of Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook will become Meta. Behind this change is also the disappearance of Oculus.

The Oculus Quest 2 helmet // Source: Frandroid / Arnaud GELINEAU

Facebook becomes Meta. Mark Zuckerberg announced the new company name during his Facebook Connect conference, dedicated to its future in augmented and virtual reality. From a distance, this change may resemble the one Google made several years ago when Alphabet was created. Closer up, however, the change seems more profound. As demonstrated by the disappearance of the Oculus brand.

Oculus also becomes Meta

Indeed, where Alphabet has hardly ever been used publicly, other than to manage the finances of the company, the Meta brand will be very visible to users. The goal of the change for Facebook is also to create a new image with the general public, after the many scandals that have hit the company until the recent revelations of the Washington Post.

Andrew Bosworth, CTO of Meta, announced on Facebook, the social network, that the Oculus brand will disappear from 2022. The Oculus Quest headset will become the Meta Quest headset, the Oculus Quest application becomes the Meta Quest application And so on.

It is therefore the disappearance of the Oculus brand bought in 2014 by Facebook for $ 2 billion, at the same time as the start-up born out of a Kickstarter project.

We are all very attached to the Oculus brand, and this decision has been very difficult to make. While we’re scrapping the name, I can assure you that Oculus’ original vision remains deeply rooted in how Meta will continue to drive mass adoption of VR today.

The software becomes Horizon

Meta is not the only brand launched by Facebook during its conference. The firm also unveiled Horizon, the name bringing together all of its new experiences in mixed, augmented or virtual reality. This new name will also affect Oculus products on the software side.

The Oculus Quest 2 interface

Oculus software will become Horizon Home, Horizon Venues, Horizon Friends or Horizon Profile.

The obligation to connect with Facebook will disappear

In 2020 with the launch of Oculus Quest 2, the firm obliged users to log in with a Facebook account making the Oculus community cringe. This meant in fact definitively associating his uses of virtual reality with his “real name” and his Facebook profile.

During the conference, Mark Zuckerberg indicated that in the future it would not be necessary to use a Facebook account on Meta products. It has the merit of being consistent. It remains to be seen how porous information and personal data will be between a Meta account and a Facebook account.