Oculus For Business goes after the same ground as HTC Vive

Like the HTC Vive before it, Oculus has realised that the big money for VR is to be found in working with businesses, not consumers. So, to that end, Oculus launched a new “Oculus For Business” initiative at this year’s Oculus Connect.

Intended to appeal to the likes of Walmart and Deloitte, Oculus For Business is a bundle not too dissimilar from the Business Edition of the HTC Vive. For $900, or a rather reasonable and oddly specific £685.62, a business gets everything it needs for room-scale VR along with enterprise-grade warranties, a VR commercial license, and a dedicated customer support channel.

Audi is one of Oculus For Business’ launch partners and has been utilising Oculus Rift to build VR car showrooms. Cisco has built a VR collaboration environment for cooperating on designs and planning in a virtual office too.

The announcement makes a lot of sense for Oculus. Not only has HTC Vive proved that there’s a market out there for enterprise-level VR solutions, but Oculus is well poised to capitalise upon it. By leveraging its parent company’s business contacts, Oculus Rift could slip into many more office environments with ease.

That said, Facebook At Work never really took off, but this is a somewhat easier sell.

It’s not yet clear if this now means that Oculus Rift will be supported inside Nvidia’s industry-grade VR collaboration and creation platform Holodeck. I wouldn’t be surprised if integration was implemented speedily as more and more users snap up Oculus Rift headsets via Oculus For Business.

Alongside its announcement of Oculus Go, it’s clear that Oculus and Facebook are aiming to capitalise on opportunities for growth instead of focusing simply on the games market it had originally targeted.