Palmer Luckey rightly gets a lot of the credit for designing the Oculus Rift, though perhaps at the expensive of other key players. Oculus CEO Brendan Iribe recently got his dues, however.
The University of Mayland last week broke ground on the Brendan Iribe Center for Computer Science and Innovation. For those that don’t remember, Iribe donated some $31 million to his former school in late 2014, shortly after Facebook had completed its acquisition of Oculus VR for $2 billion. Iribe’s donation is going towards this new building, which will specialise in futurist technology including computer vision, robotics, artificial intelligence, augmented reality and, of course, virtual reality along with new computing platforms.
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The center is set to open in 2018 and will also pay tribute to two other Oculus co-founders in the Michael Antonov Auditorium and the Andrew Reisse Park, the latter of which is honoured posthumously. It’s set to occupy 215,000 square feet and accommodate over 4,000 people at peak times, with 785 seats for classes, 13 computer labs, eight classrooms, and five seminar rooms. Facilities will also include makerspaces, VR and AR labs, and even a motion-capture lab for dancers and athletes.
Students will have access to sensors, microcontrollers, 3-D printers, robots, quadcopters, and more as they strive to create new tech. They’ll also have 24 hour access to the build every day of the week.
On an official website for the center Iribe himself notes that, with its construction, he wants College Park to feel like it’s just been hit by Silicon Valley. Anyone else interested in the facility can donate towards it via this site.
It may not be open until 2018, but you can get a good sense of how the finished product will look with a number of conceptual images above. There are plenty of shots of the particularly stunning architecture as well as the inside of the building, which was designed following visits to other tech giants like Google, Facebook and, of course, Oculus. The images showcase the auditorium, seminar room, collaborative rooms and much more.
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It looks to be an amazing space for all types of new tech. No doubt Iribe and co will also be hoping to see a new generation of VR and AR breakthroughs spawned from their generous donations.
