Facebook's VR division Oculus to discontinue in-house film production

Facebook announced yesterday that it is shutting down its virtual reality content production unit, Oculus's Story Studio to put more focus on external content makers. The Oculus Story Studio, which was opened back in 2015, has produced some widely acclaimed short films like Lost and Henry.

Oculus will now invest $50 million to directly fund non-gaming VR content creators, said Jason Rubin, the company's vice president of content. However, Rubin clarified that Oculus is "still absolutely committed to growing the VR film and creative content ecosystem." Facebook bought Oculus in 2014 by spending $3 billion. Since the past few months, Oculus has been getting closer with its parent company Facebook.

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CEO Mark Zuckerberg envisions that VR "will become a part of daily life for billions of people." According to a report, the virtual reality company now reports directly to an executive in Zuckerberg's inner circle.

Oculus had hired people from renowned animation company Pixar and the video gaming world to lead the Story Studio.

However, despite Zuckerberg's efforts to rule the VR world, Oculus has been facing some legal problems as well. Last month the virtual reality unit of Facebook was slapped with a lawsuit alleging it incorporated a lesser-known competitor's patented technology into its Rift headsets without authorization.

A California-based technology licensing firm called Techno View IP Inc. sued Oculus for infringing a 3D-imaging technology.

Unfortunately, the VR company was accused of copyright infringement by another company named ZeniMax Media Inc in February, which claimed that the Oculus used a copyrighted computer code developed by one of its employees.

The case went in favor of the former and Oculus ended up paying a whopping amount of $500,000.