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John Carmack Joins Oculus VR As CTO
Guspaz writes "In a surprising move that in retrospect makes a lot of sense, Oculus VR has announced that John Carmack will be joining the company full-time as CTO. Carmack also tweeted that his time division would be 'Oculus over Id over Armadillo. Busy busy busy!'"
From the press release, quoting John Carmack: "I have fond memories of the development work that led to a lot of great things in modern gaming — the intensity of the first person experience, LAN and internet play, game mods, and so on. Duct taping a strap and hot gluing sensors onto Palmer's early prototype Rift and writing the code to drive it ranks right up there. Now is a special time. I believe that VR will have a huge impact in the coming years, but everyone working today is a pioneer. The paradigms that everyone will take for granted in the future are being figured out today; probably by people reading this message. It's certainly not there yet. There is a lot more work to do, and there are problems we don't even know about that will need to be solved, but I am eager to work on them. It's going to be awesome!"
How long has it been since Carmack had the chance to really get down and dirty with development work? Over the past few years it sounds like he's been chafing against the demands of corporate reality and yearning to get back to actually making cool stuff. Whether or not he is actually going to get a benefit out of a startup environment is debatable though (he has a sizable personal fortune).
I worked for a company in college that put Wolfenstein 3d into a virtual reality arcade system. I met Carmack when he flew to Louisville KY to try it out (we were working on licensing agreements with id). We were using a Virtual Research Flight Helmet head mounted display with a Polhemus tracker mounted on top. Carmack seemed to enjoy it. He found our scan converter particularly amusing. This was a prototype and we needed an NTSC signal to drive the HUD and graphic cards that put out NTSC were very expensive at the time (Paradise VGA cards were something like $1500 at the time iirc). So we pointed a camcorder at a CRT monitor. It is very interesting to see him effectively entering that field now. I wonder if he even remembers seeing our product back then. The company never was able to sell any units at the astronomical price of $80,000 per unit (iirc) so the licensing deal never went anywhere. The company was Alternate Worlds Technology.