Hugo Barra is joining Facebook to lead virtual reality
facebook.com
facebook.com
Disclaimer: I work at FB.
And before anyone points out Facebook is interesting to work on because of the sheer size of the userbase the same argument could be said for working on McDonalds, Pepsi or any other low grade mass consumption product that's bad for you.
It seems like a fallacy if I understand you correctly (which may/may not be the case):
If A -> B, and you claim -B, that doesn't mean -A.
e.g. If "VR is interesting -> good societal problems to solve" , then "bad societal problem" doesn't mean progressing FB isn't interesting.
No, just that VR isn't bad or mainstream yet so you have more opportunity to shape and steer it. Tough to do if you are chained to a goliath and it's needs.
Now days, it doesn't sound quite so interesting. Back then it was impressive. There's so much extra tech available to everyone now, it's not nearly as tough as it was then.
I'm not much of a walmart fan for various reasons, but that sounded like pretty darn interesting work.
Millions of people use Facebook to stay connected with friends and family. It's the platform that has powered trillions of meaningful social connections over the years. It's not junk food or sugar water.
There's a good reason why friendships would either grow stronger or grow appart over the years. It is called Dumbar Number.
Between HTC/Valve and the upcoming Windows Holographic/XboxVR and its upcoming tracked controllers and other competitors on the horizon, I'm not sure what room there is for an Oculus PC product. I also suspect even at the $599 pricing, they're losing money, especially if you consider the millions spent paying for exclusives or even funding full games for what ended up being a market of under 250,000 consumers after 6+ months of hard work and advertising, on top of years of hype. I imagine their projections were in the low millions, not couple hundred thousand.
There was some executive shifting a few months back in VR at Facebook and they seem to be distinguishing already implying that "Desktop VR = Oculus" and that this is only a piece of Facebook's VR work.
He's probably too busy trying to develop a healthy lifestyle that helps him keep the friends he wants to care for some corporate politics like this to register. Let them take the attention, he'll find another venue for his engineering itches.
Will he?
I followed Palmer for a couple of years (on MTSB3D forums) before the kickstarter; it was his passion and dedication for hacking old/vintage HMDs that got me interested, and ultimately led me to supporting the KS.
He showed the kind of interest and dedication in DIY VR that I hadn't seen since the mid-1990s (and I only knew of one other individual at that time with the same kind of interest - DIY VR, heck VR in general outside of a few niche areas - was really dead).
DIY VR -was- his "engineering itch".
Sure - he got rich beyond his wildest dreams, but I don't think (or maybe I don't want to believe?) that was his endgame. From what I could see then, the endgame was to make VR something again - to make it "take off", to get it back to where it was (the hype?) in the 1990s. I'm not even sure if he wanted it commercialized - just more popular, and more people hacking on it. I think - or want to believe, maybe - that had the only thing that came out of the KS had been the DK1, that Palmer would be happy to have done only that. I don't think he ever intended it to become what it has, but I don't know him - maybe he did. From my perspective, which is skewed for a number of reasons (most of all because I don't know him personally), he never intended for it to explode like it has.
Personally, it surprised me greatly that it did. What I couldn't understand then (nor even now) is why there was an apparent pent-up demand for an HMD for the PC and gaming, yet virtually no one (outside of Palmer and one or two others) was hacking on HMDs? In the 1990s, there was a fairly vibrant DIY VR culture - a few well known books, an unfortunately short-lived magazine (PCVR) - but there were more than a handful of people hacking their own systems together, sharing stuff on the nascent internet and BBS's.
...then, it died off. But apparently there was still demand for it, but it seemed like nobody wanted to DIY their own systems, until after the Rift was announced. It isn't like there wasn't any information on the internet to get people started, plus the whole "maker movement" was strong. The software was all available to play with (game engines, 3d tools, etc). Yet - there wasn't any DIY movement. Until the Rift.
Strangely, though, the DIY VR movement is still fairly small; bigger than it was in 2012 and before, certainly - but it still seems like a lot of people don't want to DIY their own VR rig - most seems to only want to be consumers of the devices, not hackers/innovators - which is a bit strange to me.
Total tangent there - my apologies. As far as Palmer is concerned - well, I hope he continues with hacking VR - but I worry that the FB acquisition and the Oculus brand may dash that. I worry that he may have inadvertently killed the one thing he cared most about - hacking VR as his personal hobby - by making it big. I hope not, but I do wonder.
I'm not Palmer, but I know if I had the stark choice of choosing between being super-wealthy vs being able to freely work on and happily pursue my hobbies, I think I would ultimately kick myself if I chose the former.
He can pay for the right chips & people...
I just wonder where his non-compete clause starts and ends.
His resignation from Xiaomi was announced a few days ago - presumably in order to move to this role.
Hopefully for us ground-level users it means even more resources put into content development. Possibly new hardware revisions releasing earlier than had previously been planned as well?
I must admit I'm also hoping that any knowledge he has of the Chinese manufacturing industry contributes to smoother supply chains for Oculus products. No more parts shortages or shipping delays, pretty please. :)
(I'm not saying the pollution is not a factor, but it's probably not the main one)
Not necessarily bad, but different.
there is reason why Chinese rappers rap about food
Here's what he did say (his full post is here [1], if anyone's curious), which I think indicate culture, area, and distance from where he considers home as the factors affecting his health:
But what I've realized is that the last few years of living in such a singular environment have taken a huge toll on my life and started affecting my health. My friends, what I consider to be my home, and my life are back in Silicon Valley, which is also much closer to my family. Seeing how much I've left behind these past few years, it is clear to me that the time has come to return.
Specifics or misquotes aside, if you meant that the offer from Facebook was his primary reason for leaving, I can see that too, so won't disagree with the notion.
[1] https://www.facebook.com/hbarra76/posts/10154010035641612
It's just a matter of "is the person motivated enough?", which is more an individual thing. :D
Your response to Google it is juvenile and doesn't add to the discussion.
Let's not even get into what is (or isn't) juvenile at this point.
Is it better to feed fish to a person, or teach them to catch one?
I admit that I was snarky as a response to the entitlement I sensed in his reply to the LMGTFY link. When I come across a discussion on Hacker News (or elsewhere) talking about things I don't know, I take a moment to Google first.
Because asking "who is he, and why should I care?" (which is what the original question amounts to) isn't contributing to the discussion much either.
cough
If you Google his name, you get an article that he was a VP at Google. Put bluntly, who cares if a VP at Google and VP at Xiami moved to Facebook? Explain why this is relevant and not the equivalent of the magazines in grocery stores discussion who the latest celebrities are sleeping with.
Xiaomi's global vice president Hugo Barra is leaving the company [1] - 124 points, 87 comments
Hugo Barra is joining Facebook to lead virtual reality [2] - 99 points, 37 comments (as of the time of this posting)
So I guess some people DO care. Feel free to read through the discussion on both stories as to why those people care. If you're asking me why YOU should care, I don't think I can answer that question.
Also, sorry about the snark in my previous answer.
Neither does asking a question which is trivially answered by Googling. Why are you reserving your rage for the person trying to support community norms, and not for the person helplessly demanding that others explain to him what he could trivially discover on his own?
> A LMGTFY link is juvenile, full stop. It's not appropriate in any response.
It makes an important point that someone has asked a question beneath the threshold of questions which contribute positively to the community, and as such I'm happy that it exists, and happy when it's used. lmgtfy links are an act of community self-regulation, whether you think they're "douchey" or not, I'd rather have those links than your pointless screeds in opposition to them.
If you must rage, rage against the person whose time is apparently so much more valuable than the other members of this site that he demands his information be spoonfed to him by humans. Rage against the question "Can someone provide some context as to who this is and why it's newsworthy?" when substituted for the search query "who is hugo barra", which provides more information faster.
see my response to owebmaster.
>Why are you reserving your rage for the person trying to support community norms
It is not a community norm to condescend with instructions on how to use Google. The downvotes should make that clear.
>when substituted for the search query "who is hugo barra"
see my response to owebmaster.
I'm sorry if you have some personal connection with the guy or there was a cult of personality thing going with him at your job, but a VP of a company moving to a different company just isn't really normally newsworthy. That's why I asked in case I missed something about him changing the entire Facebook VR direction or something.
It isn't now, and that's sad. But there was a time when this community valued straightforward, direct communication. If that time has passed, it's a loss for the community, and for you, whether you understand that or not.
I know. And two decades ago, in my youthful inexperience, I was objecting against it myself (https://groups.google.com/d/msg/comp.sys.hp48/f_mPLWMO7Bo/nI...).
> You still see it a bit on the web, but not nearly as much. Of course it was rude and condescending and incredibly unfriendly to newbies
And it's also the reason I got to where I am today. It was only by being told directly to "RTFM" that I learned how to teach myself the things I needed to know, instead of relying on others to spoonfeed me information. I'm not defending it because it's something I want to do--I'm actually a very nice person--I'm defending it because it's something that benefits both the recipient and the community.
> you'd never be so rude to someone - not a friend, not a stranger, not a customer, not a colleague - but for some reason basic politeness gets a bit muddled up on the Internet sometimes.
My coworkers ask me frequently, "Does X do Y?" and I explain to them, "The easiest way to answer that question is to read the code, it's here." Or they ask me how something works and I say, "I don't know, but here's where I'd look to get that information." LMGTFY links are the online equivalent of those replies.
Invariably I've found that the people who object to LMGTFY links or "RTFM" responses or "Look it up" replies or "Try it and see" answers are fundamentally ruder than the ones who give those replies, because they feel entitled to a specific kind of remedial assistance and are too lazy to do the requisite research themselves. I know that's a broad net to cast, and I know that it catches my younger self far more often than I'd like to admit, but it's been my experience and I have no data to contradict it.
> Neither does asking a question which is trivially answered by Googling.
Two wrongs don't make a right; that you see something as a violation of the norms of the site is a good reason to downvote or flag it, it's not a good reason to respond with your own violation of those norms, and should you choose such a violation, you should not expect it to be excused.
Ask why something is newsworthy while not doing at least a basic research to have a minimum understanding of the subject is very juvenile, and the way you did was disrespectful, now you are lecturing the guy about LMGTFY? Full stop.
Did it occur to you that I did Google his name? The results are littered with this same article and a wikipedia page that mentions he had VP roles at Google/Xiaomi but there was nothing about why this would be relevant to the HN crowd other than him being a VP at big tech companies. VPs at big tech companies move all of the time and they don't make the front page, so I asked who he was and why this was newsworthy.
Apparently HN does, because that's the whole story here.
https://hn.algolia.com/?query=http:%2F%2Flmgtfy.com&sort=byP...