Facebook primes the Oculus Quest for business use cases

April 30, 2019

Facebook on Tuesday opened up pre-orders for its two new Oculus Virtual Reality headsets, the Oculus Quest and Oculus Rift S. The devices will ship on May 21 for $399 each. Facebook also relaunched Oculus for Business with entirely new enterprise-grade software and support for the Oculus Quest, an all-in-one VR system.

“VR adoption at work will accelerate, and it will change the way we work,” Isabel Tewes, who leads the VR enterprise ecosystem strategy for Facebook, said at the F8 conference in San Jose, California.

Facebook has updated Oculus for Business with the intention of supporting an ecosystem of business administrators, developers and end users, Tewes said. The new software suite takes into consideration the time and effort it takes to deploy new tools like VR headsets across a business, she said. It includes device setup and management tools, enterprise-grade service and support and a new user experience customized for business use cases. Facebook is working with enterprise IT vendors to develop ways to integrate VR into already-existing workflows and services.

Meanwhile, support for the Oculus Quest should open up new business use cases, Tewes said.

She highlighted how Walmart has deployed thousands of Oculus devices across its workforce for training, noting that their VR-based training programs reduce training time by 40 percent and improve employee performance by 70 percent, compared with traditional training.

Other businesses adopting Oculus for Business include Ford, Johnson Johnson, DHL, Farmers Insurance, ExxonMobil and Audi.

Tewes also highlighted about 20 software companies building tools specifically for the Oculus Quest, including Strivr, Osso VR, InsiteVR, Pixvana, Innoactive, Gravity Sketch and VRHealth.