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Michael Abrash Joins Oculus, Calls Facebook 'Final Piece of the Puzzle'

Posted by Soulskill on from the go-big-or-go-home dept.

trawg writes: "Programming legend Michael Abrash has announced that he has joined the Oculus team to work on the Rift VR headset as Chief Scientist, and will be once again working with John Carmack to bring VR to life. His post covers a lot of ground, including the history of his quest for VR, and ends with his explanation of why he thinks the Facebook acquisition is ultimately a good thing — they have the engineering, resources and long-term commitment 'to solve the hard problems of VR.'" Abrash has long maintained a blog about VR tech — it's worth reading if the subject matter interests you.

11 of 232 comments (clear)

  1. Facebook is written in php by Karganeth · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Keep that in mind. Facebook is not a company of technological excellence (Apple) or software excellence (Google), but simply got lucky for being the social site that everyone went to.

    1. Re:Facebook is written in php by istartedi · · Score: 4, Insightful

      I don't think he's going to be dicking around in their web site code. It could be written in Brainfuck for all he cares. What matters is they have MONEY which he can use to fund efforts at using better technology to write it. Somewhere, somebody has some social site written in the cleanest, most beautiful, maintainable, optimized code that ever existed but... they don't have MONEY. Such is the way of the world. Keeping up with the Kardashians (which is all FaceBook really is) rakes it in. By comparison, things of quality might make *some* MONEY but not enough to fund blue sky projects like VR. At least he's not building rockets for the nazis. Things are much better these days for technical people who need a sugar daddy.

      --
      For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
    2. Re:Facebook is written in php by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Insightful

      And one more thing. The basic functions of the site wouldn't be hard to create and run for a 100 people. But do that for a million and things get different. Do it for 1.2 billion and things get fucking weird. They MUST have some serious shit going on to operate at that scale. Yeah, they've got tons of market analysts and designer-types, but somewhere they've got some Ph.D. computer science guys that are making the core of the thing run, inventing technology that doesn't exist anywhere else because this kind of scale just isn't normally done.

  2. Now that the puzzle is complete... by i+kan+reed · · Score: 4, Insightful

    You can finally see the picture. It's a giant middle finger. Flipping you off. Forever.

  3. Re:And if it were written in, by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Insightful

    I'm a C/C++/VB.NET/PHP programmer and I can safely say that a good programmer can be a good programmer in PHP, it just takes more effort from the programmer to be discplined about good programming practices. And I totally agree that disrepecting a company or individual for the language their product is developed in is ill informed and shows a lack of experience and understanding of the person forming that opinion.

    One of the biggest flaws in PHP is being totally typeless and undeclared - which is a flaw that facebook themselves are attempting to remedy. I haven't actually looked into their proposed solutions, but I do at least respect their development team a bit for trying to give back to the community - even if I totally hate what they otherwise stand for as a company.

    Heck, at one point, I would of said it's impossible to make a real game in Java (which I don't know) - but look at minecraft's success. It still may not of been the best choice, but it's obviously possible.

  4. Re:Legendary... by sconeu · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Turn in your geek card.

    In addition to what other people have already said, his columns on graphics in the old dead-tree version of DDJ were a must-read.

    --
    General Relativity: Space-time tells matter where to go; Matter tells space-time what shape to be.
  5. Re:Legendary... by elysiuan · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Would never have been an error in the past sadly.

  6. Re:Legendary... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Insightful

    You might be surprised, but the scope of "graphics programming" is very limited when compared to the entirerty of the software industry.

    Making optimizations on a project and putting out a book of tricks hardly qualifies a person to be a software legend. Especially when those tricks are derived from commonly used techniques in much of the embedded system / signal processing development world where resources are extremely limited.

    Doesn't mean he's not experienced/good at what he does, but hardly qualifies to be put on the pedastal you seem to be putting him on.

    Brian Kernighan and Dennis Ritchie on the other hand...

  7. Because Oculus HR didn't get the memo yet by ggraham412 · · Score: 3, Insightful

    From the article, Abash has been around for 57 years ?

    Oculus HR obviously didn't get the memo yet to ignore guys over 30.

    1. Re:Because Oculus HR didn't get the memo yet by spire3661 · · Score: 3, Insightful

      There is no one under 30 that can do what Abrash does.

      --
      Good-bye
  8. Re:Legendary... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Insightful

    > Except I'm not a fucking programmer, and especially not a game programmer.
    Submitted story starts with: Programming legend Michael Abrash...

    It's great that you're not a programmer and all, but then why would you come into a story about programmer and act all incensed that YOU didn't know who he was? Did you miss the very first word in the description: 'Programming' ? Did you think that we would NOT be discussing about a very legendary person in the programming world?

    If you wanted an explanation, you could have asked for one. Instead you asked only, "Who?" Tell me, do you have problems detecting sarcasm? This is an actual disorder, and perhaps it would help you to know simply asking 'Who' implies to most normal people that you think Abrash is not worthy of knowing. Especially to programmers, which I may remind you is the first word of the submission.