Brendan Iribe, the co-founder and former CEO of Oculus, has announced his departure from the VR company via a Facebook post, stating that it will be his first real break in over 20 years.
This has led to a number of rumors circulating around the cancelation of the Oculus Rift 2 – the successor to the company's PC VR flagship device – as Iribe had been leading the development team responsible for the device.
According to TechCrunch, the reason for Iribe’s departure was due to “some internal shake-ups in the company’s virtual reality arm last week that saw the cancelation of the company’s next generation Rift 2”.
Facebook, the company that owns Oculus, has not specifically denied the cancelation of the Rift 2, but has assured us that the Rift platform is still being worked on and developed. A tweet from Nate Mitchell, another team leader involved in the Rift development, confirms as much:
A lot of questions today about the future of Rift — we're still driving forward on the Rift/PC platform with new hardware, software, and content. Lots of great stuff in the works. More to share in the months ahead.October 22, 2018
If this does indeed spell the end for the PC VR line of Oculus products, whether immediately or in the long term, it could mean that the company has decided to focus on its more affordable all-in-one units such as the Oculus Go and the newly announced Oculus Quest.
- The news of Iribe’s departure follows roughly 18 months after another Oculus co-founder Palmer Luckey called it quits.
