John Carmack Quits Chief Technology Officer Role at Oculus to Work on AI

[Tsing]

It appears that John Carmack may have gotten bored of VR. The legendary programmer and game developer announced on Facebook yesterday that he was moving to a "Consulting CTO" position at Oculus. While he'll "still have a voice in the development work," his future contributions will be modest. Carmack says he's transitioning to the artificial intelligence field.

Carmack had joined Oculus in 2013 as its CTO, and stayed on after Facebook acquired the VR startup for $2 billion the following year. He’s had an outsized influence on the VR space, driving both practical implementations for devices like Samsung’s Gear VR and the Oculus Quest as well as next-generation advancements.

 

[Uvilla]

Feels like VR for the home its dying bit by bit... I thought it would have grown more by now. I think for specific applications/ corporate/ science/ military its here to stay long term.

 

[DrezKill]

Dude gets bored and then moves on to new challenges. Game programming, rocket sciene, VR, now AI? Come back to video games John. Hasn't been the same without you. I miss watching his Quakecon keynotes and other talks where he goes in-depth about the games he's coding. I don't really give a **** about VR, and I think AI is a hornet's nest we shouldn't be throwing rocks at, lest humanity ends up as the next extinct species.

 

[Brian_B]

I welcome our new overlords

 

[Burticus]

Methinks he got tired of his Facebook overlords.

And yeah, I also was expecting VR to really hit a new gear and become awesome... and it just hasn't. Maybe in 5-10 years when the technology can get it down to regular glasses sized headgear and all wireless.

I was a huge VR fanboy until I actually tried some games out. Beat saber is one thing, but fully VR environments with any kind of motion made me hit the puke bucket ASAP. There are still some kinks to work out.

edit - oh yeah all the other big names including Palmer have already split. Oh well.

From the article

"Carmack’s announcement comes three months after Oculus co-founder Nate Mitchell revealed that he was leaving Facebook, and it marks just the latest high-profile executive change for the company’s VR unit. Palmer Luckey, who developed the first Oculus Rift prototype, was forced out in early 2017 following the revelation of his financial support of a far-right group. Longtime Oculus CEO Brendan Iribe left the company in October of 2018. "