Facebook is moving further away from the Oculus brand.
The company says it is changing the name of its augmented reality and virtual reality division to "Facebook Reality Labs," a division that will include the company's AR / VR products under Oculus. Spark and Portal brands.
The company's AR / VR research division changed its title from Oculus Research to Facebook Reality Labs in 2018. That division will now be known as FRL Research.
Facebook also announced that Oculus Connect, its annual conference for virtual reality developers, will be renamed Facebook Connect and will take place virtually entirely on September 16.
Oculus had a very different existence within Facebook than other high-profile acquisitions like Instagram or WhatsApp . The org has been tucked deeper into the heart of the company, both in terms of leadership and organizational structure. The entire AR / VR organization is managed by Andrew Bosworth, a longtime executive of the company who is a close confidant of CEO Mark Zuckerberg.
In some ways, the name change is just an indication that Facebook's product ambitions in the AR / VR world have gotten bigger since its acquisition of Oculus in 2014.
Facebook is now no longer just building headsets, it's also building augmented reality glasses, they're adding AR software integrations into their main app and Instagram via Spark AR, and, yes, they're still doing a few things with the Facebook portal.
In another sense, adding the term "Labs" at the end of a division that is several years old with several products you have spent billions of dollars on, seems to be Facebook doubling down on the idea that everything in it is (1) rather experimental and (2) doesn't contribute that much to Facebook's bottom line. This looks like the likely home for future Facebook moonshots.
The change will likely shock some Oculus users. Facebook's reputation issues seem anecdotally to have a particularly strong hold among PC gamers, leaving some Oculus fans generally unsatisfied with any news showing the Oculus brand that strays further away from Facebook's core organization. Last week, the company shared that new Oculus headset users will need to log into the platform with their Facebook account and that over time they would gradually phase out Oculus accounts, a change that was met with hostility by insiders who believed it Facebook would have kept more distance between the main social app and its virtual reality platform.
At this point, Oculus is still the brand of the VR headsets Facebook sells, and the company claims the brand isn't going anywhere, but directionally it looks like Facebook is aiming to bring the brand closer under its wing.
