With Facebook‘s cutover to a new corporate name — meta — the company is giving the Oculus brand the axe.
Andrew “Boz” Bosworth, who is currently head of Facebook Reality Labs overseeing the company’s VR and AR businesses, announced a series of nomenclature changes in a Facebook post Thursday.
“VR will be the most immersive way for people to access the metaverse and as we look toward our goal of bringing 1B people into VR, we want to make it clear that Quest is a meta product,” Bosworth wrote. “For this reason, we’re simplifying our brand architecture and shifting away from the Oculus brand.”
Starting in early 2022, the Oculus Quest virtual-reality headset will become “meta Quest,” and the Oculus App will be renamed “meta Quest App” over time. Facebook bought Oculus seven years ago for $2 billion.
“We all have a strong attachment to the Oculus brand, and this was a very difficult decision to make. While we’re retiring the name, I can assure you that the original Oculus vision remains deeply embedded in how meta will continue to drive mass adoption for VR today,” Bosworth said.
In addition, going forward, meta’s Reality Labs group is working on “new ways to log into Quest that won’t require a Facebook account, landing sometime next year,” Bosworth wrote. “This is one of our highest-priority areas of work internally.”
In other branding changes, Facebook Reality Labs will be dropping “Facebook” from its name and plans to expand meta Horizon “as the brand that will encompass all of our first-party immersive social experiences,” according to Bosworth.
“You’ve seen this already with Horizon Workrooms and Horizon Worlds. Soon you’ll see us shift from Oculus to Horizon Home, Horizon Venues, Horizon Friends, and Horizon Profile,” he wrote. Other changes will include relabeling Facebook Portal as “meta Portal.”
Bosworth is in line to become the company’s next CTO, after Mike “Schrep” Schroepfer steps down from the chief technology officer sometime in 2022.
