„What we got wrong at Oculus that Apple got right“

Faszinierender wird’s heute nicht mehr: Hugo Barra arbeitete bis 2021 (!) im Oculus/Meta-Team und schreibt ein Vision-Pro-„Review“.

Back in my Oculus days, I used to semi-seriously joke with our team (and usually got a lot of heat for it!) that the best thing that could ever happen to us was having Apple enter the VR industry and become a direct competitor to Oculus. I’ve always believed that strong competition pushes a team to do their best work in any industry. […]

Watching TV/movies in virtual reality seemed like such an incredibly compelling idea that we (the Oculus team at Meta/Facebook) built an entire product around that idea — Oculus Go. Launched in 2018, Oculus Go was the biggest product failure I’ve ever been associated with for the simple reason that it had extremely low retention despite strong partnerships with Netflix and YouTube. Most users who bought Oculus Go completely abandoned the headset after a few weeks. The full story is much more nuanced (including the fact that the Oculus Go failure got us on the path to Oculus Quest very quickly), but it taught us an important lesson.

The lesson we learned is that watching traditional (rectilinear) TV or movies in VR feels incredibly compelling at first, but the novelty wears off for most people after a few weeks.

Hugo Barra (former Head of Oculus at Meta)

Derartige authentische Einblicke, nur drei Jahre nach einer vierjährigen Anstellung in der Führungsetage der direkten Konkurrenz, lesen wir fast nie.