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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.

7 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 Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Interesting

      Actually, FB has a lot of technological excellence... it isn't seen:

      1: They have done more for biometric security and automated facial recognition than virtually any other company out there.

      2: They have a very well made system for hunting down people who are actual people versus dummy/sock puppet accounts that get squashed.

      3: They are excellent at geolocation.

      4: They created the "commodity hardware, have the backend application do all the redundancy" where the fault tolerance is in the top of the stack, as opposed to the hardware like the IBM mainframes. This allows for the absolute cheapest machines possible, and if they die, things continue on. Even entire data centers can drop off the face of the earth.

      5: They have the best behavioral reporting and profiling tech out there. Want to check if people 18-25 are interested in your new widget? Easily done by a FB trial balloon.

      6: FB advertising is one of the few channels that work. People turn off their TV, but the FB ads will still come to them no matter what. I've used it to propagate info for a non-profit gathering... and attendance doubled.

      7: FB is one of the few enterprises that can actually get btrfs from an early beta state to a finished product that can handle production data. Without Facebook, btrfs would probably spend another five years being semi-ignored.

      8: FB is one of the few Internet based companies, who, a year after IPO, has stock prices higher than they were when hitting the market and still solid.

      9: FB has very tight security. You never see a note about Facebook being hacked, and in security, no news is good news.

      10: FB is platform agnostic.

      So, even though people bag FB, it is one of the smartest-run businesses on the face of the planet.

  2. Re:Legendary... by jones_supa · · Score: 5, Informative

    He was a developer in Quake and has released Michael Abrash's Graphics Programming Black Book.

  3. Re:Legendary... by OnceWas · · Score: 5, Informative

    "Michael Abrash is a game programmer and technical writer specializing in optimization and 80x86 assembly language, game programming, a reputation cemented by his 1990 book Zen of Assembly Language Volume 1: Knowledge. Related issues were covered in his later book Zen of Graphics Programming. [...] After working at Microsoft on graphics and assembly code for Windows NT 3.1, he returned to the game industry in the mid-1990s to work on Quake for id Software. "

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M...

    --
    Laugh while you can, monkey-boy.
  4. Re:Legendary... by Animats · · Score: 5, Informative

    He's well known if you're into the low-level machinery of game graphics.

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

    Would never have been an error in the past sadly.