In a report from Bloomberg, Oculus VR‘s model for expansion and fulfilling it’s long term objective, to have 1 Billion users in Virtual Reality, it’s choosing to adopt a proven method borne out by the success of Google’s Android platform.
Iribe made it clear that Oculus, even with Facebook’s backing, isn’t big enough to tackle this daunting task by itself. “If we do want to get a billion people on virtual reality, which is our goal, we’re not going to sell 1 billion pairs of glasses ourselves” told Bloomberg. “We are openly talking to any kind of partner that wants to jump into VR, and there’s a lot of interest right now.”
It makes sense that Oculus would follow the predominately open licensing model Android have successfully used to push Android to 900 Million activated devices. Concentrating on getting Virtual Reality right first though is still the company’s critical objective. “We need to get it right before we engage and work with other people” Iribe says.
The journey to get that VR offering right for consumers starts another leg in July, when Oculus plans to ship 20-30,000 Developer Kit 2 (DK2) units to those who pre-ordered from March when the unit was announced. But the details of how Oculus will tackle this expansion model is as yet unclear. It’s unlikely Android’s ability to run on any hardware that chooses to adopt it will work with VR due to the tight constraints required to ensure the hardware delivers the best experience possible. Doubtless we’ll find out once we know more about the consumer release, which up to now Oculus have remained tight lipped over.