Josh Carpenter has found a new employer at Google where he’ll be working on Cardboard as a product designer for WebVR. Carpenter left a leadership position working with Mozilla’s VR research team earlier this year.
At Mozilla, Carpenter worked on WebVR and A-Frame, each of which were designed to expose the power of immersive VR to the great many Web developers spread across the globe. Developers building high-end games have found their toolsets naturally extended to include VR platforms. Web developers, however, haven’t been able to use their tools to create the same kind of high quality experiences.
That was clearly a goal at Mozilla for the MozVR team Carpenter led and it seems he will be continuing similar work at Google.
I'm joining Google VR to work on #webvr with @borismus and @Tojiro. VR is for everyone, & WebVR is going to help make it happen. Stay tuned!
— Josh Carpenter (@joshcarpenter) May 9, 2016
Under new leadership from Clay Bavor, Google is accelerating its VR efforts and hosting a developer conference later this month in San Francisco where we will get an information dump about new initiatives. A world in which VR grows out of game technologies rather than web technologies — where Google reigns supreme — could put Google at a disadvantage in the long run. While it could help Google too, Web developers would benefit if it became easier to make high quality VR experiences using the technologies driving so much of what we already use the Internet for everyday. Maybe that’s what Carpenter could do at Google?
