Facebook, Instagram director of products joins the virtual reality revolution

By Jon Martindale January 12, 2016

facebook instagram director of products joins the virtual reality revolution peterdeng — Peter Deng/Facebook

Oculus VR is adding another experienced individual to its team, this time cribbing them from its patent company, Facebook, and its image sharing platform, Instagram. Peter Deng will be taking over the role of head of product management at Oculus. He announced his excitement in a Facebook post where he waxed lyrically about the future potential of VR.

Deng has spent the past eight years working at Facebook as director of product management and will continue to do, if his Linkedin profile is anything to go by. However he will no longer be acting as director of products at Instagram, a post he’s held since August 2013.

It’s presumed that coming from his social background, Deng will be looking to push those aspects of virtual reality while under the Oculus banner. However, he also mentioned the excitement of developing new user interfaces and user experiences in VR.

“Helping to mentor and grow a team of talented product managers,” is something else he is specifically looking forward to, and said that through Oculus and its partners, the company can build a whole new definition for how humans “react with each other and with the world.”

He also thanked his coworkers at Instagram and wished them well in the future, stating that he has every faith that they will take the company to new heights in 2016. Some of them in-turn showed up in the announcement comment section to wish him well for the future and congratulate him for landing on his feet.

It seems everyone agrees that Oculus is one of the most exciting ventures currently under the Facebook banner.

This almost stamps the final box on Deng’s tech-firm bingo card. Having worked for Microsoft, Google, Facebook and now Oculus, if he could finish of his career at Apple he’d have a full house.

Editors' Recommendations

Topics

Computing Coordinator

Jon Martindale is the Evergreen Coordinator for Computing, overseeing a team of writers addressing all the latest how to…

Social Media

NFTs are coming to Instagram, with testing starting this week

A woman seated at a table scrolls through her instagram timeline.

Those non-fungible tokens (NFTs) aren't going away anytime soon. In fact, they're even coming to a certain popular photo-sharing app near you.

On Monday, Mark Zuckerberg, co-founder and CEO of Meta Platforms, announced via a video posted on Facebook that Instagram would begin testing NFTs as early as this week. Referring to them as "digital collectibles," Zuckerberg said that the move to test NFTs on Instagram was so "that creators and collectors can display their NFTs" on their profiles. He also went on to mention that a "similar functionality" would also be brought to Facebook as well, but did not specify when that would happen.

Social Media

Instagram brings product tagging to all public accounts

Instagram app on the Google Play Store on an Android smartphone.

If people are constantly asking you where you got that outfit or hitting you up for other recommendations, Instagram's latest feature expansion is for you. And you don't even have to be have an influencer account to use it.

On Monday, Instagram announced that its product tagging feature will now be available to all Instagram users, as long as they have a public account. So even with your personal (non-brand) account, your selfies and other photos can now feature product tags that your followers can use to learn more about the product and purchase it (in app or via a product detail page).

Computing

This futuristic haptic vest should make virtual reality feel more realistic

actronika haptic vest skinetic vr more realistic virtual reality

Actronika, a startup company known for its HD haptics technology has a futuristic new product. Expected to be on display at the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in January 2022 is Skinetic, a haptic vest that should make virtual reality experiences feel a lot more realistic.

Skinetic works much as you'd expect. The wearable vest makes VR feel more immersive by bringing life-like sensations and touch-like experiences to areas of the body like the chest when paired with a compatible headset. As reported by Business Wire, the technology "works with 20 patented vibrotactile voice-coil motors, capable of generating a wide range of vibrations that cover 100% of human vibrotactile perception."