Facebook is discontinuing the Oculus Go standalone VR headset
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The Oculus Go standalone wireless virtual reality headset is now two years old and getting long in the tooth, but Facebook has no plans to replace it.
Writing on the Oculus blog, the company revealed that it has moved on from the limited functionality of the headset.
The headset doesn’t require any PC or a phone, and offers a lighter, more comfortable and extremely convenient experience, allowing users to simply pulling out and watching a movie on a flight for example. It does, however, have some limitations, principally that it only offers 3 degrees of freedom tracking (looking left and right, up and down and rotation), making it more similar to a Galaxy Gear VR headset than something like the Oculus Rift.
At the same time as the Oculus Go Facebook also announced another stand-alone headset, the Oculus Quest, which offered a full 6 degrees of freedom (including moving forward, backwards, up and down and left and right), much more similar to the grown-up Oculus Rift, and according to Oculus this turned out to be a much more successful product.
Despite being based on a mobile chipset, the Quest even supported desktop titles via the Oculus Link feature, which provided a wireless connection with your PC.
Oculus has now announced that it was formally discontinuing the Oculus Go, and said they won’t be shipping any more 3DOF VR products.
Oculus Go sales will end this year and current devices will not be getting any new features. Oculus will also not be accepting any more Oculus Go apps or app updates into the Store after December 4, 2020 and stop adding new Go apps into the Store after December 18, 2020.
Oculus will continue to maintain the system software with bug fixes and security patches through 2022 however.
Overall it seems the Oculus Quest is the future, and Oculus says they plan to go all-in with the product. This will include a new way for developers to distribute apps for the headset without going through the Oculus Store, with the company set to release more details later.
