Valve VR leader joins Oculus R&D with new Seattle team
Oculus has scooped up Atman Binstock as its new Chief Architect; he's the former Valve virtual reality head and one of the leaders of the VR Room demo at Steam Dev Days. Binstock will head up a new Oculus R&D team in Seattle, Washington, which joins existing offices in Irvine, California, Dallas, Texas, and San Francisco, California. It's worth noting that Valve is based in Bellvue, Washington, roughly 15 minutes from Seattle.
Binstock says he began working on VR at Valve two years ago, after a pitch from Valve R&D leader Michael Abrash:
"Michael convinced me that this was basically the myth of technological inevitability: the idea that because technologies were possible, they would just naturally happen. Instead, the way technological revolutions actually happen involve smart people working hard on the right problems at the right time. And if I wanted a revolution, and I thought I was capable of contributing, I should be actively pushing it forward. I signed up."
Valve and Oculus are working together on the Oculus VR headset, and together they created the most recent Oculus prototype, the Crystal Cove. Valve doesn't plan on releasing an in-house VR headset, and will instead focus on helping Oculus.
In February, we learned Oculus was running out of dev kits because some components were no longer manufactured. Now, the company has closed sales in most regions and it's ramping down production. Oculus writes, "We never expected to sell so many Rift development kits and the fact that we're close to being sold out after 60,000 kits is nothing short of incredible - Thank you for your support!" There's no word on a new dev kit model.
http://www.joystiq.com/2014/03/11/va...-seattle-team/
