It was over three years ago now that Oculus VR co-founder Andrew Reisse had his life tragically taken. This month, his killer was sentenced.
24-year-old Victor Manuel Sanchez received a 15-year-to-life sentence, according to the Orange County Register. Sanchez took Reisse’s life in a car accident on May 30, 2013. He hit the Oculus lead engineer while attempting to flee police in a Dodge Charger. The car hit Reisse at a crosswalk between MacArthur Boulevard and South Flower Street near his home in Santa Ana, California. According to the Register, prosecutors said Sanchez had been speeding, surpassing 60 mph in residential areas and reaching nearly 100 mph during the chase.
While being pursued, Sanchez hit the brakes and slammed into another vehicle, spinning out of control and hitting Reisse, who was on his way home from lunch. The impact threw him over 60 feet. He died at the scene. Sanchez pleaded guilty to second-degree murder. He was previously convicted of evading police in another car chase in Long Beach back in 2008.
Reisse was an essential member of the Oculus team in its early days, taking the lead on the Oculus software development kit (SDK) that was instrumental in getting developers started creating VR software. He also spearheaded integration of Epic Games’ Unreal Engine, now one of the most popular VR game-building tools, and worked on many of Oculus VR’s early demos for the Rift.
In a memorial post released a day after his death, Oculus called Reisse a “brilliant computer graphics engineer” and “close friend”. At the time of his passing, Oculus VR was still in the process of selling and shipping its first development kit (DK1) for the Oculus Rift after closing out an immensely successful Kickstarter campaign. It would be just under another year before the company would introduce DK2 and be acquired by Facebook for $2 billion, but there’s no doubt that Reisse’s work was essential in getting the team there. Three years after that tragic event, the Oculus Rift is now available and recognized across the world.
Reisse will also be honored in the upcoming Brendan Iribe Center for Computer Science and Innovation at The University of Maryland. The site’s park will be named after him while its auditorium will be named after fellow co-founder Michael Antonov.
