Facebook hires Xiaomi's Barra
Hugo Barra is a Brazilian computer scientist, technology executive and entrepreneur.
Facebook has hired Hugo Barra to lead its virtual reality efforts just days after he quit Chinese smartphone maker Xiaomi Corp.
Barra, who led Xiaomi's international expansion, will now take on a different challenge as vice president of virtual reality.
He will need to navigate the competitive and young market, where Facebook's Oculus Rift and Gear products have drawn interest but not dominance.
Barra will draw on his experience building an operating system business, with Google's Android, and a hardware brand, with Xiaomi's phones, to help Oculus. Facebook in December gave the chief executive officer of Oculus, Brendan Iribe, a narrower role and started looking for a replacement for the division.
Facebook bought Oculus for about US$2bn in 2014.
CEO Mark Zuckerberg envisions virtual reality as a social platform, and says Barra will help the company achieve that. Competitors have been more focused on gaming.
“Hugo shares my belief that virtual and augmented reality will be the next major computing platform,” Zuckerberg said in a Facebook post.
“They'll enable us to experience completely new things and be more creative than ever before.”
FIN24
Barra, who led Xiaomi's international expansion, will now take on a different challenge as vice president of virtual reality.
He will need to navigate the competitive and young market, where Facebook's Oculus Rift and Gear products have drawn interest but not dominance.
Barra will draw on his experience building an operating system business, with Google's Android, and a hardware brand, with Xiaomi's phones, to help Oculus. Facebook in December gave the chief executive officer of Oculus, Brendan Iribe, a narrower role and started looking for a replacement for the division.
Facebook bought Oculus for about US$2bn in 2014.
CEO Mark Zuckerberg envisions virtual reality as a social platform, and says Barra will help the company achieve that. Competitors have been more focused on gaming.
“Hugo shares my belief that virtual and augmented reality will be the next major computing platform,” Zuckerberg said in a Facebook post.
“They'll enable us to experience completely new things and be more creative than ever before.”
FIN24
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