Facebook iterated VR hardware publicly to reach mainstream consumers
Benedict Evans · What the Apple and Facebook events tell us about their product cycles · Oct 19, 2020 · at 7:19
Tech analyst Benedict Evans analyzes Facebook's multi-year hardware progression leading up to the launch of the Oculus Quest 2.
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“Whereas what you see from Facebook in a very different environment is they're trying to make VR work, and, you know, VR, we had a first coming of VR in the late eighties and early nineties, and obviously the technology wasn't up to it, and then Sort of seven, eight years ago, people said, oh my God, VR would work now because the chips and the screens and the sensors and so on are there. And since then, we've had this public iteration slowly getting towards a consumer product. So there was, they shipped what they call the DK, developer kit one, developer kit two. It's not for consumers. You need a 2000 dollar PC. Let's see if this works. Let's see what people build with it. Let's experiment with it. And now then they have the Oculus. Now this week's event, the Oculus Quest two, which is 300 dollars and is kind of a consumer product. And they've slowly iterated Iterated in public to get to the point that this is now something you might actually tell a normal person who isn't excited by VR that they should buy.”
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