Valve Head of R&D Joins Oculus

Michael Abrash jumps ship.

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Complex Original

Image via Complex Original

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VR has had a banner week, what with Facebook buying Oculus VR for a tidy $2 billion. Now news has hit that Michael Abrash, former head of research and development at Valve, has left the company to join oculus as chief scientist. It's unclear what Abrash had been working on at Valve, who stated during January's Steam Dev Days conference that they would be working with Oculus to help push VR technology forward rather than develop a competing headset of their own, but in any case, he seems excited about the future.

"The resources and long-term commitment that Facebook brings gives Oculus the runway it needs to solve the hard problems of VR – and some of them are hard indeed. I now fully expect to spend the rest of my career pushing VR as far ahead as I can," he wrote in a blog on the Oculus website.

Abrash also wrote that he'll be happy to work again with John Carmack, who he previously worked with on Quake in the mid-nineties. In any case, with Facebook's resources and some of the best minds in the business working on the project, it would appear that Oculus has a chance to find huge mainsteam success.

[Via Joystiq



 

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