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Meta starts rebounding with Oculus Rebrand
Well, that didn’t take long.
A week after CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced that Facebook would rebrand itself as Meta, in anticipation for a company-wide focus on creating and constructing some version of the forthcoming metaverse, the company made its first changeover, dropping the name “Oculus” from the company’s virtual reality (VR) line, and renaming those holdings into Meta. Effectively immediately, Oculus Quest and Oculus Quest 2 are now Meta Quest and Meta Quest 2. That’s according to Andrew “Boz” Bosworth, who is about to become the Chief Technology Officer (CTO) of Meta.
Bosworth is a fellow Harvard man alongside Zuckerberg.
The two met there in the early 2000s when Bosworth was a teaching assistant in a class on Artificial Intelligence.
While Zuckerberg dropped out to create Facebook, Bosworth graduated from Harvard in 2004 and began work at Microsoft as a developer on Microsoft Visio. Just two years later he got a call from a recruiter and joined Facebook as one of its first 15 engineers. In 2012, he took over Facebook’s mobile ad design, and in 2017 he was promoted to vice-president for augmented reality and virtual reality.
Quest made it just 2-½ years under the Oculus name, debuting in May 2019 and replacing its predecessor, Oculus Go.
The original queset was replaced by Quest 2 in October of 2020.“
The name change is meant to reflect the company's growing shift in values as it works to expand its ambitious metaverse platform,” Zuckerberg said, confirming that the name change will become effective over the course of 2022.
The presentation came with all new promotional imagery for Meta Quest which had a graphic featuring the original Oculus logo. It is a suave move on Meta’s part, because Oculus is almost as synonymous with virtual reality as Facebook once was with social media.
In order to get people hyped up about the changeover, Meta is teaming up with ILMxLAb to bring a special preview of its Star Wars VR game “Star Wars: Tales from the Galaxy’s Edge” to the Downtown Disney District at Anaheim, California’s Disneyland Resort.
A special edition of the new game will be featured at the Disney Parks Magical Christmas Day on Saturday, December 25.“We are excited for guests to virtually experience Seezelslak’s Cantina and meet Mubo (Owner of the Droid Depot!) at the Downtown Disney District activation,” said Jose Perez III, Director, in an official release. “ILMxLAB worked diligently expanding the story of Star Wars: Galaxy’s Edge and we all hope our guests have a wonderful time visiting the strange and beautiful planet of Batuu in VR.”
Batuu is the name of the “planet” that is represented at Galaxy’s Edge, the Star Wars themed “land’ that exists at Disneyland as well as DisneyWorld’s Hollywood Studios in Orlando.
Oculus has produced two fairly popular VR games based in the land, featuring popular Star Wars characters like R2D2, C3PO, and Yoda, along with some animatronic characters who appear in the various shops and stores of the theme park.
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