Enlarge / Sorry, Henry. Oculus just blew your candle out. (credit: Oculus Story Studio)
If the world of virtual-reality filmmaking has a big future, it won’t be developed within one major company’s offices: Oculus.
The Facebook-owned VR company announced late Thursday that its internal Oculus Story Studio, dedicated to producing short films for viewing within an Oculus Rift headset, has been shut down, effective immediately. Oculus VP of content Jason Rubin confirmed the news in a company blog post. He said that Oculus would shift its resources to “funding and supporting” projects by a growing crowd of unaffiliated filmmakers and design studios.
“In the same way we invested in the third-party game developers who made the incredible content lineups for Rift and Gear VR, we’re going to allocate more resources to third-party creatives to build out the VR storytelling library,” Rubin writes. That sentence spells out a strategy of buying up and securing exclusive rights to other studios’ VR story projects—which will surely ruffle feathers and inspire more rogue installations of compatibility-opening software such as Revive.
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