Almost a year after announcing Scaleform co-founder Brendan Iribe as the CEO of Oculus VR, the team is proud to announce another key position has been filled in the young company. As of today id Software co-founder and video game programming pioneer John Carmack will serve as the Chief Technology Officer for Oculus VR.
Though Carmack will still contribute to id Software, he stated via Twitter that his main focus will be at Oculus.
A long-time supporter of the Oculus Rift and VR enthusiast, Carmack infamously cast Oculus VR founder Palmer Luckey’s device into mainstream awareness during E3 2012 with ademonstration of Doom 3 BFG Edition through his own jerry-rigged prototype Rift. A couple months after the expo, Carmack appeared in the Virtual Insanity panel session with Luckey at QuakeCon 2012.
Now Carmack will play a heavy hand in furthering the development of virtual reality through the Rift providing his extensive experience and enthusiasm in the evolution of technologies which bring video games to the public.
“I have fond memories of the development that led to a lot of great things in modern gaming,” said Carmack. “I believe that VR will have a huge impact in the coming years, but everyone working today is a pioneer.”
Though best known as the programmer behind Wolfenstein 3D, Doom, and Quake series, and more recently Rage; throughout his career Carmack has solved many graphical problems for video game developers by either utilizing theoretical software techniques or devising his own.
From adaptive tile refresh which utilized EGA hardware features to handle scrolling for PC side-scrollers improving overall game performance two decades ago, to developing MegaTexture which allows an engine to render portions of a single yet vast and highly detailed texture without hogging large quantities of RAM; his technical contributions to video game engines and graphical rendering are immense.
That expertise in problem solving will benefit Oculus VR as they come face-to-face with the challenges of virtual reality that await their own progress in developing the Rift into an immersive high-quality yet affordable VR headset.
“The paradigms that everyone will take for granted in the future are being figured out today,” said Carmack. “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.”
Though Oculus VR is based in Irvine, CA; Carmack will head the technological arm of the company at a new office location opening in Dallas, TX.
