Oculus was a virtual reality hardware and software brand founded in 2012 by Palmer Luckey, acquired by 📝Facebook in 2014 for two billion dollars, and retired in 2022 when its product line was rebranded as Meta Quest.
Oculus began as a Kickstarter campaign for the Oculus Rift — a tethered PC headset that triggered the modern consumer VR wave — and was acquired by Facebook before shipping its first consumer unit. Under its new parent, the brand expanded from PC VR into standalone hardware with the Oculus Go, Quest, and Quest 2, the last of which became the first commercially mainstream consumer VR device.
In late 2022, 📝Meta folded the Oculus brand into its corporate identity, renaming the headset line Meta Quest and consolidating the hardware effort under 📝Reality Labs. The lineage continues through devices like the 📝Meta Quest 3S, which inherit Oculus's runtime, controller design, and storefront while serving Meta's broader 📝metaverse ambitions.
As a brand, Oculus is now retired; as an engineering and cultural seed, it remains the foundation of Meta's hardware bet. Its acquisition is also cited in antitrust narratives about Facebook's evolution from a pure social company into a vertically integrated stack spanning content, advertising, AI, and immersive hardware.
You can't make out with someone while wearing a VR headset. Had 📝The Birthday Girl and I been playing VR instead of an arcade game, our story might never have manifested — 📝entertainment is the consumption of fun, not the production of presence.