In light of the company’s rebrand from Facebook to Meta, incoming CTO Andrew Bosworth revealed that the Oculus brand will be retired, with products like Oculus Quest 2 to be renamed Meta Quest 2 from early 2022.
Bosworth says that they “want to make it clear that Quest is a Meta product,” which means that they will be “shifting away from the Oculus brand” across existing and future hardware products:
Starting in early 2022, you’ll start to see the shift from Oculus Quest from Facebook to Meta Quest and Oculus App to Meta Quest App over time.
We all have a strong attachment to the Oculus brand, and this was a very difficult decision to make. While we’re retiring the name, I can assure you that the original Oculus vision remains deeply embedded in how Meta will continue to drive mass adoption for VR today.
Likewise, other hardware products will transition to the new Meta branding as well — Facebook Portal will become Meta Portal.
Facebook Reality Labs will change its name to to just ‘Reality Labs’ and that the change will take effect internally and externally “over the next few weeks and months.”
First-party social experiences will also shift away from the Oculus brand:
We’ll also expand Meta Horizon as the brand that will encompass all of our first-party immersive social experiences. You’ve seen this already with Horizon Workrooms and Horizon Worlds. Soon you’ll see us shift from Oculus to Horizon Home, Horizon Venues, Horizon Friends, and Horizon Profile.
This is the first mention of a new profile type, a ‘Horizon Profile’. We don’t have any other details, but plans for a Horizon-branded profile may tie-in with the news that Facebook is working on “more options” for logging in on Quest without a Facebook account, shifting away from the mandatory requirement implemented last year.
Bosworth acknowledged the forthcoming Quest login changes in his post and said it is one of their “highest priority areas of work internally.”
Update: On Twitter, Bosworth said that “retiring was too strong a term” and that he would revise his Facebook post as the Oculus brand “will still be a big part of our software portfolio for developer tools and things like Oculus Studios.”
