Facebook Focuses on 6DoF VR, Discontinues Oculus Go

Facebook announced it would end sales of the Three Degrees of Freedom (3DoF) Oculus Go and cease supporting the platform (security patches and bug fixes) in 2022; current users, however, will stop seeing new features or applications for the device by December 2020. The company will instead put its efforts behind Six Degrees of Freedom (6DoF) platforms, Quest and Rift, and in the process bookmark an end to one phase of Virtual Reality (VR)’s early stages of development. While the current installed base of Oculus Go users may not relish in the news, a large majority of the industry has voiced support for the decision and view it as a step forward for VR. Is 3DoF VR truly end-of-life (and should it be)?

Even when VR failed to live up to lofty early expectations and mobile VR faltered, many within the industry still believed VR would continue to support both 3DoF and 6DoF experiences. This was a reasonable expectation, since 360 video was and still is largely a 3DoF viewing experience, and the prospects of volumetric 360 video seemed far off—in fact, early innovators in the space, like Lytro, were not commercial successes (many of its former employees were absorbed by Google) and even NextVR, which was an early 360 video leader and teased 6DoF video, faced a challenging market and was acquired by Apple. Immersive video, though, has failed to resonate among consumers and correspondingly is rarely included in video companies’ near-term strategic plans, which limits the value for 3DoF VR. 3DoF VR has, however, had significant use in the commercial space, for training, where many experiences were designed and well-suited for 3DoF (this will likely change with Oculus’s shift to 6DoF only). The excitement surrounding the Quest, however, has already spurred many commercial VR companies to shift focus to standalone VR over the less expensive 3DoF solutions (and even tethered in some cases). So, the transition within the commercial space should go relatively seamlessly.

Many within the industry are also quick to point out the potential damage lesser 3DoF devices like Google Cardboard may have caused among first time VR users. To these individuals, the cancellation of the Oculus Go, which represented the pinnacle of current 3DoF experiences, is a necessary culling and step that will help VR mature. From a developer’s perspective it certainly helps narrow the playing field, allowing them to focus on one type of VR experience instead of supporting both 3DoF and 6DoF interfaces/controls. While VR experiences will differ based on hardware capabilities, consolidating the VR market into 6DoF experiences does help homogenize expectations when it comes to VR.

However, the loss of 3DoF VR does raise the price of entry for VR, and for some companies that offered applications and services that only needed 3DoF this could increase the barrier to entry. Ultimately, though, 6DoF will provide users with a better experience, not only in terms of immersion, but also in regard to viewing comfort by supporting a user’s head movements within a full 360-degree space. The upcoming arrival of VR viewers, which rely on a mobile device’s compute power, will also need to support 6DoF experiences and controls, which could raise the price of these devices if 3DoF solutions were planned.    

A recent ABI Insight, XRSpace Hoping to Make VR More Social (IN-5839), also included a recommendation section that opened with this heading and, while that piece did not speak specifically to 3DoF versus 6DoF experiences, the premise remains the same. While diversification and competition are good, there is inherent value in consolidation, especially in a nascent market like VR. While 3DoF experiences will persist (e.g., 360-degree video) the devices will support 6DoF, giving application developers a more equitable baseline. For end users the VR experiences will become more consistent and, while the higher prices could delay some adoption, they will help with first impressions. Hardware manufacturers have a challenging roadmap ahead: on the one hand, they need to keep pushing the ball forward to advance the technology and provide better experiences, but on the other hand they also risk fatiguing the user base. There are already talks about a next-generation Quest device even though it is still riding the initial hype train and resulting demand, which, if launched too soon, could cause potential users to avoid entering the market until hardware becomes more stable.

This is one reason mobile VR held promise and could still play a larger role with VR viewers, but if this facet of the market does not come back, then standalone VR Head-Mounted Display (HMD) manufacturers should find a way to make their devices more upgradable and modular. The Oculus Quest Link (which allows the Quest to work as a tethered VR HMD) is one example where the device is essentially hardware/compute upgradable, just via an external Personal Computer (PC). This will become especially critical as the displays start to reach a level where there are diminishing returns by increasing resolution. We are still at least a couple of years away from starting to see some mainstream-level devices that begin to approach the performance seen on commercial devices like Varjo’s HMDs. Before this stability arrives, it would behoove manufacturers to implement some form of upgradability, especially if the upgrade cycles are going to occur in this two- to three-year time frame—VR devices will not see anywhere near the same levels of acceptance from end users as smartphones for a similarly short upgrade cycle. There could be multiple tiers of devices, allowing the applications to scale based on hardware specs, but in these cases if the gaps between the lowest and highest end devices become too great, and assuming the larger volumes will occur at the lower cost tiers, then by virtue of targeting the largest installed base developers will still target these devices, limiting the potential benefits of the higher performing products.