Oculus Go will outsell all other quality VR headsets this year: analyst

Facebook’s brand-new stand-alone virtual reality headset, the Oculus Go, will outsell all other VR gear, except for dirt-cheap headsets based on Google’s low-end Cardboard, this year.

That’s according to a report out this afternoon from SuperData Research. Facebook began selling the Oculus Go today, timed to F8, its annual developers conference.

SuperData predicts that Facebook will sell 1.8 million Oculus Go units this year. Despite only being available for eight months of 2018, that would leave the first-to-market stand-alone VR headset outselling Samsung’s Gear VR (590,000 units), Sony’s PlayStation VR (1.47 million), Oculus’s own Rift (120,000), HTC’s Vive (170,000), Microsoft’s Windows Mixed Reality (120,000), and Google’s Daydream View (50,000) this year.

The research lends credence to the idea that stand-alone headsets are a big step forward for the VR industry, given that they free consumers from having to pair a headset with either a high-end mobile phone or a high-end PC, and, at long last, open up quality VR to iPhone users.