{"id":336877,"date":"2017-03-28T03:01:39","date_gmt":"2017-03-27T19:01:39","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/techcrunch.com\/?p=1469313"},"modified":"2017-03-28T03:01:39","modified_gmt":"2017-03-27T19:01:39","slug":"facebook-hires-apple-veteran-to-lead-virtual-reality-hardware-efforts-at-oculus","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/people.utm.my\/asmawisham\/facebook-hires-apple-veteran-to-lead-virtual-reality-hardware-efforts-at-oculus\/","title":{"rendered":"Facebook hires Apple veteran to lead virtual reality hardware efforts at Oculus"},"content":{"rendered":"

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Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg wants the company to own the future of virtual reality, and in the short term that means putting a lot of VR headsets on a lot of\u00a0faces. Even for\u00a0a company with nearly 2 billion monthly active users, hardware is still an incredibly difficult beast\u00a0to master. To do so, the company is looking to Apple, hiring Michael Hillman, a 15-year veteran from the company, to lead the VR product roadmap for Oculus as head\u00a0of VR hardware.<\/p>\n

An Oculus spokesperson\u00a0tells Bloomberg<\/a> that Hillman will work closely alongside Oculus COO Hans Hartman<\/a> in his role.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

Oculus head of VR hardware Michael Hillman<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

Hillman worked in senior engineering and design roles at Apple where he worked on products like the iMac. According to his LinkedIn<\/a>, Hillman spent his final four years at Apple working in a confidential hardware role. Hillman is listed as an inventor on a number of Apple patents related to displays and battery technologies. Hillman left Apple in 2015, later joining Zoox, an autonomous vehicle startup.<\/p>\n

The organizational\u00a0structure\u00a0at Oculus has grown increasingly peculiar over the past few months with the virtual reality company growing much closer to its parent company Facebook. In December, co-founder Brendan Iribe stepped down as CEO to lead the PC-based VR division. Unlike other siloed Facebook products such as\u00a0Instagram, Oculus will soon\u00a0report directly to an executive in Zuck\u2019s inner circle, the recently-hired Hugo Barra, joining from Xiaomi to lead VR efforts.<\/p>\n

Hillman adds\u00a0another degree of separation between Facebook\u2019s top brass and the original Oculus co-founders, a group which has recently been\u00a0divided into organizationally separate mobile and PC-based hardware teams. While former Oculus CTO John Carmack and Chief Software Architect Michael Antonov are now working on the mobile team\u2019s software advances, Iribe and former VP of Product Nate Mitchell are separately leading efforts on the PC-based Rift hardware.<\/p>\n

With Hillman coming aboard as head of VR hardware, it\u2019s worth noting that\u00a0Oculus has already shown prototypes that look beyond its current Mobile\/PC-based org structure. At the company\u2019s OC3 developer\u2019s conference late last year, Oculus gave press previews of \u201cSanta Cruz\u201d its wirelessly tracked all-in-one prototype headset. An Oculus executive\u00a0told TechCrunch that the company\u2019s standalone headset was being developed under\u00a0a separate\u00a0team outside of the PC-based hardware division.<\/p>\n

The company\u2019s current flagship virtual reality device, the Oculus Rift headset, was released one year ago with more than a healthy amount of delays caused by manufacturing issues, something that caused quite a bit of anger among early adopters who were already upset by the headset\u2019s higher-than-expected $599 price tag. The company released its Touch motion controllers for the Rift in December and last month slashed the prices of both the controllers and headset by $100.<\/p>\n

Featured Image: GABRIELLE LURIE\/Getty Images<\/small><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

\"\" Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg wants the company to own the future of virtual reality, and in the short term that means putting a lot of VR headsets on a lot of\u00a0faces. Even for\u00a0a company with nearly 2 billion monthly active users, hardware is still an incredibly difficult beast\u00a0to master. To do so, the company is looking to Apple, hiring Michael Hillman, a 15-year veteran from the company,… Read More<\/a><\/p>\n

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\"\"\/ <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5817,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[25],"tags":[59,66,26],"class_list":["post-336877","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-technology","tag-media","tag-techcrunch","tag-technology"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/people.utm.my\/asmawisham\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/336877","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/people.utm.my\/asmawisham\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/people.utm.my\/asmawisham\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/people.utm.my\/asmawisham\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5817"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/people.utm.my\/asmawisham\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=336877"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/people.utm.my\/asmawisham\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/336877\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/people.utm.my\/asmawisham\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=336877"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/people.utm.my\/asmawisham\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=336877"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/people.utm.my\/asmawisham\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=336877"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}