Good news for the Oculus team for sure, it’s not every day that a company trying to change the world actually gets the opportunity to make a real attempt at it.
“Virtual reality has been a long-standing dream in tech and sci-fi. To me it always felt kind of inevitable but it was one of those things, you never knew quite when it would become a reality,” Dixon tells The Verge. He was impressed with the first developer kit he saw last year, but not enough to invest. Now, however, he says that Oculus has achieved what he was looking for. “The dimensions where you need to improve this kind of VR are latency, resolution and head tracking, and they have really nailed those things.”
All of Oculus’ previous partners, including Matrix and Spark, are also increasing their investment. It’s a very sizable Series B round, a lot of money for a company that hasn’t released a consumer product yet.
However, Oculus CEO Brendan Iribe tells The Verge that his company needs the money to build that consumer product, plain and simple. “The reality is going into the consumer market with a full platform as expansive as this at high volume… really takes a significant investment,” says Iribe. “You look at the cost of goods at the hardware side, setting up the infrastructure… it’s pretty easy to do the math.”
“We always knew we needed a B round to get to the consumer market at volume. We didn’t know the scale we needed for V1 until recently,” Iribe says.
