We have incredible news to share with the community: legendary game programmer John Carmack will be officially joining the Oculus team as our new Chief Technology Officer (CTO).
John is one of the brightest minds of our generation -- pioneer, visionary, and industry legend. There are very few people in the world that can contribute to the Oculus Rift and the future of virtual reality like John can.
John put together a short note for the Oculus community:
“I have fond memories of the development work that led to a lot of great things in modern gaming – the intensity of the first person experience, LAN and internet play, game mods, and so on. Duct taping a strap and hot gluing sensors onto Palmer’s early prototype Rift and writing the code to drive it ranks right up there. Now is a special time. I believe that VR will have a huge impact in the coming years, but everyone working today is a pioneer. The paradigms that everyone will take for granted in the future are being figured out today; probably by people reading this message. It’s certainly not there yet. There is a lot more work to do, and there are problems we don’t even know about that will need to be solved, but I am eager to work on them. It’s going to be awesome!”
If you’re unfamiliar with John’s background, John co-founded id Software, served as lead programmer on Wolfenstein 3D, Doom, and the Quake series, and is one of the pioneers of 3D graphics. When John’s not working on revolutionizing video games or computer graphics, he can be found coding at Armadillo Aerospace.
If you’ve been following Oculus since the launch of the Kickstarter campaign (or before that on MTBS3D), you know that John has been a part of the project and a true believer in the future of virtual reality since the beginning. He was the first developer to actually integrate the Rift into a game, back when the hardware was just a hand-held prototype without an SDK.
John will be working from the new Oculus Dallas office that we’re opening soon. We’re looking for a few key hires to help us in Dallas, so if you’re interested, check out the Oculus Careers page.
Please join us in welcoming John to the Oculus family! You can follow John at @ID_AA_Carmack on Twitter.
Happy anniversary to our Kickstarter backers! We've come a long a way in 1 year, and we can't wait to show you where we're headed next. This is just the beginning.
It's his hobby job. Armadillo Aerospace is winding down since he spent a few million of his own money on it and isn't finding any new investment money, so he needs another side job to keep his genius mind at work before it hits critical mass, goes thermonuclear, and takes out a large part of Texas.
VR stuff is kinda dumb if you ask me. It will remain this way until you don't need to wear a gigantic fucking ugly mask on your face. Sign me up for Matrix style, kthx.
obsidian wrote:It's his hobby job. Armadillo Aerospace is winding down since he spent a few million of his own money on it and isn't finding any new investment money, so he needs another side job to keep his genius mind at work before it hits critical mass, goes thermonuclear, and takes out a large part of Texas.
On twitter he said his priority is currently: oculus then id then armadillo.
I think Oculus could be very cool and with John on board I'm even more excited for it. It could potentially revolutionize 3D films too.
I'm not sure what to make of that, for normal people that means that Oculus is your day job, then you work part time at id and Armadillo on weekends. John Carmack isn't like normal people, he seems to have a superhuman work ethic. In his QC keynote he mentioned how he can now twiddle with code on his iPad during those times of the day when normal people would be idling around... when taking a shit, normal people would be playing Plants vs. Zombies on their iPad, Carmack is probably working out raytracing algorithms.
I think he means that his cybernetic brain is currently allocating more CPU threads on solving Oculus problems than working on the id Tech 5 renderer because it's a fresh problem that intrigues him, but that doesn't mean that he's sitting in some office at Oculus Inc. most days of the week and his responsibilities at id are any more diminished.
Also consider the possibility that since their next game is built using the same engine as Rage, Carmack isn't needed at the forefront of id's engine development work. I bet by the time idTech 6 needs to be made, he's fulltime back at id Software again.
Hero-worship has always been a bit of a problem in the games industry, but this is kinda retarded. He's a programmer who worked on video games. He didn't cure cancer. You fanboys are falling into the same trap people always do...you expect them to excel at whatever they do no matter what.
Hero-worship has always been a bit of a problem in the games industry, but this is kinda retarded. He's a programmer who worked on video games. He didn't cure cancer. You fanboys are falling into the same trap people always do...you expect them to excel at whatever they do no matter what.
Just look what happened to Albert Einstein ffs.
What you're failing to understand is that Carmack = 5,000 coders which means less floor space
[color=red] . : [/color][size=85] You knows you knows [/size]
