The Facebook-owned VR upstart, Oculus, is going through a major internal restructuring. This is leading the co-founder and CEO Brendan Iribe to step down from his current role and take on a more hands-on role. Thus, the top leadership position of the VR tech behemoth is now empty for the taking.
This move from the company was announced via an official blog post which states that Oculus now needs to extend its reach and explore new platforms from the prospect of making virtual reality ubiquitous. Hence, the company is internally dividing itself into two distinct groups, where one would focus their efforts on desktop VR (Oculus Rift) and the other on mobile VR (Samsung Gear VR).
Changing the world on that scale has required us to also scale Oculus at warp speed. With our growth and product strategy, we’ve decided to establish new PC and mobile VR groups to be more focused, strengthen development and accelerate our roadmap.
With a new vision and an even ambitious goal in foresight, Brendan Iribe has decided to himself lead the PC/desktop VR group within the company. And he will be stepping down from his executive role to enable Oculus further push the state of virtual reality forward with Rift, research and computer vision. This move from Oculus comes on the heels of the release of the new Touch controllers, which VR gamers have long itched to use.
Talking about the same in the blog post, Iribe adds,
As we’ve grown, I really missed the deep, day-to-day involvement in building a brand new product on the leading edge of technology. You do your best work when you love what you’re working on. If that’s not the case, you need to make a change. With this new role, I can dive back into engineering and product development. That’s what gets me up every day, inspired to run to work.
In addition, the mobile VR division would be spearheaded by Jon Thomason, who just recently joined Oculus as head of software. Previously, he was the vice president of mobile shopping at Amazon. He will now be responsible for further improvements in the smartphone-powered VR experience. This divide means good news for the company as it sees a more fruitful future in mobile and affordable VR experiences as compared to the bulky developer kits — currently bwing shipped to users.
Iribe, along with Facebook CTO Mike Schroepfer, will now also be leading the effort to pick out the one person who can fill his shoes and keep the VR giant grounded in reality – while also leading it to great heights. Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg has also reiterated his vision for the acceleration of virtual reality tech in the modern world and this reshuffling will enable him to see it through in the coming months. Oculus is currently also working on a standalone wireless headset as well.
