The shakeup in Facebook at senior levels continue with the latest announcement by Brendan Iribe that he is leaving Oculus, the company and project he headed for nearly six years. The reason for Iribe’s departure is said to be the decision by the company to cancel the “Rift 2”, the virtual reality (CR) headset that is based on the PC.
Brendan Iribe posted his farewell message on his Facebook wall, thanking everyone in the Oculus/Facebook team and to announce that he was moving on and taking a break after a long duration.
“I'm deeply proud and grateful for all that we've done together. We assembled one of the greatest research and engineering teams in history, delivered the first step of true virtual presence with Oculus Rift and Touch, and inspired an entirely new industry. We started a revolution that will change the world in ways we can't even envision,” he said in his Facebook post.
However, according to a TechCrunch report, differences within the larger management setup kept growing and his decision to quit would have been a culmination of that. It is also learnt that those at the top desired that the headphone being developed by Oculus must be a standalone product and not be dependent on being connected to a PC or even a phone. This was why the Rift- 2 was slowed down and its launch event postponed. Officially, however, Facebook has maintained that the “Rift-2” headset project is very much on course and more products will be released in future.
But the exit of a series of people at the top from Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp and now Oculus cannot be put down as a mere coincidence. The first to go was WhatsApp co-founder Jan Koum; then Instagram co-founders Kevin Systrom and Mike Krieger made an exit. And now the Oculus CEO. Amidst the sea of troubles Facebook already finds itself in following the Cambridge Analytica data sharing episode, the company has been in the news for all the wrong reasons.