The end for Oculus Go is nigh. The latest Oculus SDK (v19/1.51) no longer supports the company’s first true standalone VR headset.
The company says in the SDK’s developer release notes that both Unity and Unreal Engine support for Oculus Go has officially been dropped. Facebook says developers can still use Oculus Integration v18.0 or prior, although this effectively puts another small fire under developers to either finish up their Go projects soon, or migrate them to Quest.
All of this should come as no surprise to Go developers however, as Facebook announced back in late June that it would be retiring Oculus Go. While the headset’s system software will still receive bug fixes and security patches through 2022, the company said it would be starting down the path of phasing out the headset, culminating in a complete content pipeline freeze in December 2020.
Despite its lack of positional tracking and motion controllers, the cheap and cheerful 3DOF headset attracted many VR newcomers thanks to its positioning as an accessible, casual content device. Starting at $200 for the 32GB version, and later knocked down to $150 in January 2020, it still represents the cheapest way to get into reasonably good VR.
Although it was clearly priced to fly off the shelves at launch in May 2018 and obviously also resonated with consumers during holiday rushes, Facebook has said that Oculus Go will be their last 3DOF device, instead favoring Quest as they move forward into an all-6DOF future.
We’re hoping the fabled Oculus Quest 2 brings along with it some price reductions to the previous Quest, which is currently priced at its original launch price tag of $400/$450. Maybe eventually a 6DOF device can fill that low price point too, although there would need to be a hell of a price cut.
Source: https://www.roadtovr.com/oculus-sdk-go-standalone-3dof/