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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.

6 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: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.
  4. Re:Legendary... by elysiuan · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Would never have been an error in the past sadly.