Valve developer Michael Abrash, who was recently championing virtual reality technology as a whole at Steam Dev Days in January, has joined the team at Oculus. The VR company is creator of the Oculus Rift headset, and was just purchased by Facebook for $2 billion, which sparked a lot of backlash from segments of the gaming community.
Abrash is understood to have lead most VR research at Valve, and will now be Oculus' new Chief Scientist, a role he is excited to take. John Carmack, legendary game designer and CTO at Oculus, said he is very happy to have Abrash on board, and the new employee wrote a post explaining his move, which can be found here. The following is an excerpt from his full statement:
"We're on the cusp of what I think is not The Next Big Platform, but rather simply The Final Platform--the platform to end all platforms--and the path here has been so improbable that I can only shake my head."
"The final piece of the puzzle fell into place on Tuesday. A lot of what it will take to make VR great is well understood at this point, so it's engineering, not research; hard engineering, to be sure, but clearly within reach. For example, there are half a dozen things that could be done to display panels that would make them better for VR, none of them pie in the sky."
"However, it's expensive engineering. And, of course, there's also a huge amount of research to do once we reach the limits of current technology, and that's not only expensive, it also requires time and patience - fully tapping the potential of VR will take decades."
"That's why I've written before that VR wouldn't become truly great until some company stepped up and invested the considerable capital to build the right hardware - and that it wouldn't be clear that it made sense to spend that capital until VR was truly great. I was afraid that that Catch-22 would cause VR to fail to achieve liftoff."
I recently wrote about how the Facebook buyout is not likely to cause the downfall of Oculus Rift, as did game designer Cliff Bleszinski and others. Abrash backs the Facebook acquisition, citing the social media giant as the big company that needed to come up and invest considerable capital
"Facebook's acquisition of Oculus means that VR is going to happen in all its glory. 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."
Abrash previously worked at Microsoft, where he met Valve co-founder Gabe Newell, as well as id Software, where he met Carmack. He has the credentials to back his new role, throwing another big hat into the Oculus-supporting ring. Despite his impressive history, he names VR tech as the most influential technology he's seen.
"It's great to be working with John again after all these years, and with that comes a sense of deja vu. It feels like it did when I went to id, but on steroids - this time we're working on technology that will change not just computer gaming, but potentially how all of us interact with computers, information, and each other every day."
"I think it's going to be the biggest game-changer I've ever seen - and I've seen quite a lot over the last 57 years. I can't wait to see how far we can take it."