The studio, creator of the award-winning short Henry, closes its doors after having fulfilled its objective. Facebook will allocate funds to support the narrative contents of external studies.
Oculus it has announced the closure of its division dedicated to the creation of narrative virtual reality content, Oculus Story Studio, thus ending a stage of more than 2 years that has left great works such as Lost, Dear Angelica and the Emmy winner, Henry. The studio was born to demonstrate the possibilities and appeal offered by this new medium, with real-time narration, and inspire other filmmakers to invest in virtual reality. Since since then, new creators have entered the market in anticipation of the growth that this new medium is expected to have, Facebook has decided to put an end to Story Studio to allocate resources in the best way to achieve a greater impact on the ecosystem. Therefore, from now on they will support third-party content.
This will help Oculus internally dedicate itself to the research and development of the unresolved problems that virtual and augmented reality harbors, while focusing on funding the large community of filmmakers and developers committed to narrative in virtual reality. In the same way that they have been doing with game content, with titles such as, for example, Robo Recall, Rock Band VR and Wilson’s Heart. Therefore, the closure of Story Studio becomes the opportunity for a multitude of studies that they will be able to benefit from greater support from Oculus and Facebook.
To begin with, they are going to allocate 50 million dollars, of the 250 million that they announced in the last Oculus Connect, to finance content not related to video games and support the most innovative ideas. Oculus will also continue to offer tutorials, programs and best practices guides, among others, as well as the Launch Pad and VR for Good initiatives.
