Facebook closing half of its Oculus Rift VR demo stations

After losing $500 million in an infringement lawsuit (though it was not found guilty of infringement), Facebook Oculus is continuing to have a crappy start to 2017. Business Insider reports that 200 of Best Buy’s 500 Oculus Rift demo stations are being closed for good, due to low interests from customers. Best Buy employees stated that the demo stations would be unused for days, while some stated buggy software as the problem, though Oculus spokeswoman Andrea Schubert said that the headsets were being removed as they were only being demoed for the season, and it’s just a standard post-holiday scale back.

She still plans to demo the headset however, stating “We still believe the best way to learn about VR is through a live demo,”. Going forward the company will hold events offering live demos of its VR technology at stores and community events.

VR is not catching on as quickly as most manufacturers would like, with VR headsets totaling sales of only 2 million units, with the Rift coming behind both Sony’s PlayStation VR and HTC’s Vive.

“For me, this is not a technology that’s going away, but one that’s going to take time to mature into what people want it to be,” Brian Blau, an analyst for Gartner, said.

In other Oculus news, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg recently showed off a pair of prototype Oculus VR gloves. He posted some images on his social network that you can view below.

https://www.facebook.com/zuck/posts/10103490859636101