Facebook is killing the Oculus brand name as part of its huge Meta rebrand

• Facebook announced it was rebranding as "Meta" on Thursday.
• Executive Andrew Bosworth said it was renaming its Oculus virtual-reality headset and app.

Facebook's Oculus Quest virtual-reality headset is getting renamed as part of the company's sweeping rebrand.

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced Thursday during the company's Oculus Connect event that Facebook was rebranding as "Meta," a name that he said reflected the tech giant's push into the so-called "metaverse."

Facebook executive Andrew Bosworth, who heads up the company's virtual reality and augmented reality division, announced in a Facebook post Thursday that the Facebook-made Oculus Quest VR headset would be renamed the Meta Quest, and the accompanying Oculus App would be called the Meta App.

This effectively kills Oculus as a brand - although some "software and developer tools" will still bear the Oculus name, he wrote.

"When people buy our products, we want them to clearly understand that all of these devices come from Meta and ladder up to our metaverse vision," Bosworth wrote.

"We all have a strong attachment to the Oculus brand, and this was a very difficult decision to make. While we're changing the brand of the hardware, Oculus will continue to be a core part of our DNA and will live on in things like software and developer tools," he added.

Bosworth also announced a change to the division name. Previously called Facebook Reality Labs, the unit will lose the "Facebook" and just be called Reality Labs.

Zuckerberg said Thursday that under its new name, the company will be split into two sections: its Family of Apps - i.e., its social media business, including the Facebook app, Instagram, and WhatsApp - and Reality Labs.

The metaverse is a term borrowed from science-fiction, and refers to a future version of the internet which people access using VR and augmented reality (AR) headsets, rather than through screens on phones and laptops.

During Thursday's virtual conference, Facebook also unveiled some new virtual- and augmented-reality products it plans to bring out in the future. It teased a high-end VR headset called "Project Cambria" as well as a pair of AR glasses, codenamed "Nazaré."

"From now on, we'll be metaverse first, not Facebook first," Zuckerberg said Thursday. The company announced last week it planned to create 10,000 jobs in Europe over the next five years to help build out its metaverse ambitions.