By Queenie Wong, The Mercury News
Facebook-owned Oculus is on the hunt for a new leader to head the virtual reality company.
On Tuesday, the tech firm’s CEO and co-founder Brendan Iribe announced in a blog post that he’s stepping down from the position to head a new division within the company focused on virtual reality for personal computers. Jon Thomason, the company’s head of software, will lead another new group that focuses on virtual reality for mobile devices.
“Looking ahead and thinking about where I’m most passionate, I’ve decided to lead the PC VR group — pushing the state of VR forward with Rift, research and computer vision. As we’ve grown, I really missed the deep, day-to-day involvement in building a brand-new product on the leading edge of technology,” Iribe wrote in the post.
With his new role, Iribe said he can “dive back into engineering and product development.”
Facebook purchased the virtual reality headset maker for about $2 billion in 2014. The social media company’s CEO Mark Zuckerberg has talked about a future in which virtual reality will enable people to experience moments with their friends and family as if they’re really there in person.
But Oculus has faced some challenges this year as it competes with similar products, including the HTC Vive and the PlayStation VR. Oculus delayed the shipment of its Rift headsets, which sell for $599. The tech firm also postponed the release of its highly anticipated $199 Touch hand controllers, but started shipping them this month.
On top of that, some developers criticized Oculus co-founder Palmer Luckey for funding Nimble America, a political organization that supported Donald Trump while he ran for president.
Still, the Rift headsets have generally received good reviews and only started shipping in late March. Brian Blau, an analyst with Gartner, said he wasn’t sure what to make of Oculus’ changes in management, but said that it’s unfair to judge the business performance of a company with a product that has only been out for a few months.
“Oftentimes, founders of the company aren’t the long-term leaders of the company. This happens a lot in Silicon Valley. It’s quite common for executives to change from the original founders to ones that can take the company in a different direction, and that’s not a bad thing,” Blau said.
Iribe said that he and Thomason will be working with Facebook Chief Technology Officer Mike Schroepfer to find a new leader.
©2016 the San Jose Mercury News (San Jose, Calif.) Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.
