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Facebook’s VR head Hugo Barra leaves the company

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DQINDIA Online
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Hugo Barra

Facebook’s VP of Reality Labs partnerships, Hugo Barra is leaving the company after four years. Barra was instrumental in the development of Facebook’s Oculus and AR/VR team at the social media giant. Barra announced the exit in a Facebook post.

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“Today is my last day at Facebook Reality Labs, after 4 years working on projects that have been more exciting and more challenging than anything I've encountered in my career, with some of the brightest minds and kindest people I've ever had the pleasure to meet.

When Mark Zuckerberg approached me 5 years ago to come to Facebook to lead the Oculus team and work on virtual reality, I knew I was jumping into an ambitious journey to help build the next computing platform but I couldn't have imagined just how much this team would get done in just a few years. Looking back at what we accomplished together with Oculus Go, Quest and Quest 2, I'm truly beyond proud. And I'm equally excited about what's yet to come, starting this year with the launch of Facebook's smart glasses in partnership with Ray-Ban, which will begin connecting the dots from today's VR headsets to tomorrow's AR glasses,” he wrote.

Barra’s recruitment at Facebook by Mark Zuckerberg was with the aim to develop and further the company’s VR initiative. Barra had been in a new role leading the company’s partnership efforts in the AR, VR ecosystem since 2019 and another executive, Andrew Bosworth succeeded as the new head of Facebook Reality. Barra previously worked at Xiaomi as VP of global and before that was VP of Android product management at Google.

Though he hasn’t said much about the next move, Barra wrote in his post, “I believe society is still poorly equipped with the tools people need to really understand our health and gain control over our health outcomes. Inspired by this reflection and after working in tech for over 20 years, I've decided to try something completely different — to dive into the deep unknown (for me) and explore the healthcare technology space. I hope to be able to apply what I've learned from working in the consumer tech industry to help solve meaningful problems in the healthcare world.”

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