Facebook Hires Former Apple Exec for Big Oculus Virtual Reality Job
Facebook’s Oculus virtual reality business has a new executive to oversee hardware.
Oculus said Monday that it hired Michael Hillman, a 15-year Apple veteran who helped manage several of the technology giant’s big hardware projects like its iMac personal computers. He eventually became the chief architect for all of Apple’s desktop computers, according to Bloomberg News, which first reported the news.
Hillman left Apple
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in 2015 and became a vice president at the robotics startup Zoox, where he worked for a little over a year, according to his LinkedIn profile. He will report to Oculus chief operating officer Hans Hartmann, who joined the virtual reality unit in May 2016 after serving as COO at fitness gadget maker Fitbit.
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“We’re excited to have him leading the hardware organization,” an Oculus spokesperson told Fortune in an email. “We have a world-class hardware team that led the development of Rift and Touch and we’re going to keep investing in hardware as we push the boundaries of VR technology and build next generation consumer VR products.”
Oculus’s new executive is the company’s latest big hire as it competes with other technology giants like Sony and Taiwanese smartphone maker HTC in the nascent virtual reality market.
Although Oculus doesn’t disclose sales of its Oculus Rift headsets, several analyst firms estimated that the company has shipped far fewer headsets than what it originally projected prior to the device debuting last spring. The high price of the headsets coupled with the need for powerful computers is one reason why analysts believe the technology has yet to catch on with many consumers.
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In January, Facebook fortune-stock symbol=”fb”] hired the prominent technology veteran Hugo Barra to oversee its Oculus virtual reality unit Barra was previously the vice president at Chinese smartphone maker Xiaomi and was an executive at Google for several years.
