Earlier this year Facebook appointed Hugo Barra as its new VP of VR, leading the Oculus team forward. Now the company is looking to unify its VR efforts with its other consumer hardware projects, and it’s doing some shifting around to make that happen.
Facebook this week confirmed to UploadVR that it has appointed Andrew “Boz” Bosworth to oversee its consumer hardware divisions, including Oculus as well as devices being built by its Building 8 team. As Business Insider reports, it’s rumored that the latter is working on a smart speaker device as well as others such as a 360 degree camera.
“We are excited about our long-term investments in virtual reality, augmented reality, and consumer hardware,” a spokesperson told UploadVR in a statement. “We believe these new technologies have the potential to bring the world closer together in entirely new ways, and we’ve built great teams with strong leadership in each of these areas. Bringing these teams closer together will help us move even faster as we continue to invest in our 10-year roadmap.”
What this means for Oculus directly is currently unclear, though we know Barra will be reporting to Bosworth from now on. Facebook declined to offer further clarity on his role.
Bosworth was formerly Facebook’s VP of Ads and Business Platform, which is being taken over by Mark Rabkin.
Oculus’ next big showing for the Rift and more will be at its fourth Connect developer conference in October. Last year the group debuted Facebook Spaces and a prototype for its standalone VR headset, as well as detailing the launch of its Touch controllers. Expect this year to be a similarly significant event.
