Facebook has confirmed that the company is selling Oculus Medium to Adobe. It is a 3D virtual reality sculpting tool for creatives which has proved to be an expensive effort for Oculus. While the company has confirmed the sale, terms of the deal weren’t shared.
The sale of Oculus Medium signifies a broader rethinking within Facebook in what virtual reality projects they tackle in-house. It is clear that Oculus has pumped in a lot of money into Medium over the years and the sale probably isn’t great for the Oculus Medium team, if only because there is now a proper price tag attached to the effort that will be looming for the fairly niche software.
Oculus was purchased by Facebook for $2 billion in 2014 and the company launched Medium just two years after that. It operated separately from Facebook, which pumped large amounts of funding into the app that allows users to sculpt, model and paint in an immersive environment.
The app, used to create films and video games, works exclusively on the PC-based Oculus Rift headset. Making the announcement, Medium said in a blog post: “Adobe is one of the world’s leading creation software companies, and they’re committed to providing best-in-class 3D and immersive tools for artists including Adobe Dimension and the Substance tools suite.”
According to analysts, Medium deal could signal that Facebook is scaling back its VR efforts or that Oculus intends to increase its focus on its other main 3D tool, Quill, which was relaunched in August as Quill 2.0.
