There was little surprise in 2013 when former id Software lead John Carmack left the company for a Chief Technical Officer role at Oculus VR, and there is perhaps less surprise to hear now the new post doesn’t mean that Carmack hasn’t completely abandoned his game developer roots. Brendan Iribe, CEO of the company behind Oculus Rift, said as much in a CES 2014 interview with Engadget.
“He’s working on a lot of exciting tech … but, his heart and soul and history certainly lies in the game-development side,” Iribe said. “It’s been John Carmack’s philosophy — you gotta eat your own dog food here, and develop internal content also.”
Much of the software development focus right now at Oculus VR appears to be on developing a user interface that will come with the headset when it ships “later this year” (Iribe’s words). There’s no internal push at the moment to develop Oculus Rift games – that the company is willing to talk about, at any rate – but the CEO notes that he “wouldn’t be surprised” if more software followed the base UI.
Carmack will lead that charge, but he’ll be joined by others soon enough. Iribe notes that the Oculus VR careers page should be showing a lot more activity over the course of the coming year, and he expects to see bona fide game developers joining the company’s ranks before long. Such is the excitement for the Rift. Be sure to check out Engadget’s report for more on this exciting, rapidly growing presence in interactive tech.
