Facebook has been pretty hands-off when it comes to providing VR solutions for enterprise, although that may be changing with the entrance of bonafide enterprise versions for both Oculus Quest and Oculus Go.
As first reported by Variety, Facebook recently published a job listing for an Oculus software engineer that details the company’s plans to launch enterprise versions of Go & Quest sometime this year.
“Starting with VR, we are building an Oculus Go and Oculus Quest Enterprise edition expected to launch in 2019,” the listing states.
“This effort encompasses everything from hardware integrations, software platforms, enterprise-developer ecosystems and SDKs, SLAs, and more.”
While far from revealing, a company spokesperson confirmed with Variety that the upcoming enterprise edition products will be part of the company’s existing business offerings.
The job listing goes on to put emphasis on augmented reality as well, saying the company is looking for someone to “create the technology that makes VR and AR pervasive and universal.”
Oculus already sells both Rift and Go for Business, although these offer little more than a few extras such as commercial licenses, commercial warranties, “preferential” customer service, and some bits and bobs like extra facial interfaces and sensors (for Rift).
Some of the listed job duties may portend greater enterprise services coming from Oculus though:
- Design and develop enterprise features into Oculus mobile VR system applications
- Design and develop VR frameworks to enable enterprise use cases such as corporate training
- Ensure security and privacy concerns remain a top priority and are identified and addressed
- Work with external developers innovating on future-of-work experiences
To make matters more interesting, HTC recently announced their enterprise-focused Vive Focus Plus with 6DOF controllers. At the time it was a bit of a stretch to call it true competitor to the similarly-kitted Oculus Quest based on the fact that the companies were targeting different market segments. With Oculus’ parent company Facebook eyeballing enterprise too now, that might change here fairly soon.
We hope to learn more soon—possibly at GDC 2019 later this month—although the company could equally use F8 2019 (April 30th – May 1st) as a potential venue for further announcements. We still don’t know exactly when the $400 Oculus Quest is set to launch. Either venue fits into the company’s quoted launch window of spring 2019.