Happy 1st Birthday, Oculus Quest!
Oculus Quest is 1 year old today. When I decided to take the offer to join Facebook in the fall of 2018, little did I know what I was embarking on. At that time, I was doing well at Amazon having spent the past few years shipping blockbuster Echo Dot and Echo devices and looking forward to shipping more. Moving to work on VR was a risk of sorts. In 2018, VR was dealing with growing pains. Despite Rift being a groundbreaking VR experience, it had not seen the mass adoption to match its cult status. In 2016, Facebook first talked about Project Santa Cruz, an all-in-one, PC-free, standalone VR headset. VR enthusiasts were cautiously optimistic but there was a lot for the team to prove.
At Oculus Connect 5 (the week before I joined), Facebook announced that Oculus Quest was coming in the spring of 2019. Right after my orientation, I was thrown into a crazy schedule and a large organizational effort to ship Quest in the next 8 months. This period was no different than the birth of any other genre defying v1 product. Having experienced a ring-side view of many v1 products from Amazon, this was a familiar yet unique experience for me. To convince the world that Oculus Quest represented not just the next big step for Facebook but for the VR category itself, the team had to get the core experience right. This included among other things, a safe and simple guardian system, an ergonomically comfortable headset and the same world-class tracking experience of Rift, just without the external sensors. While this seems simple on paper, it was a massive effort requiring many engineers, designers, program and product managers, legal, finance, marketing, operations and other key personnel executing towards a single goal of building a breakthrough product experience.
What shipped on May 21, 2019, was exactly what it was promised to be. A breakthrough product that made not just VR enthusiasts, but the general population, stop and take notice. Quest debuted to strong reviews both from press and the public and continues to receive rave reviews from everyone who experiences it for the first time. I am incredibly proud of all the new features our AR/VR team has shipped since launch - Oculus Link to support PC VR gaming on Quest, Hands experiences and so much more. Game developers have had a lot of success in the platform which is a great feeling.
Personally, I am incredibly thankful that I have had this opportunity to work on a groundbreaking product. I have learned a lot and continue to learn more about this exciting technology and where it can go from here. In these interesting times where many of us are and will be working from home for an undefined period of time, building tools and technologies to bring people together virtually takes on a lot more urgency. As we have seen our Quest users drive significantly higher usage in the past few months, I feel like the moment for VR is now. And I am glad to be at this place, at this time, with an opportunity to make a difference. On this first birthday of Oculus Quest, I can’t be more excited for what the future bodes for Quest and VR in general.
Happy 1st Birthday, Oculus Quest!