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He will lead Facebook’s VR efforts, including the Oculus team

From left to right: Hugo Barra and Mark Zuckerberg in VR

Mere days after he publicised his resignation from the position as Vice President for International at Xiaomi, Hugo Barra has announced he will be joining Facebook.

He will be taking up the role as Vice President of Virtual Reality, and will be leading the Oculus team. The co-founder and former Oculus CEO, Brendan Iribe, had stepped down late last year after a company restructuring, and will be leading the PC division of Oculus Rift instead.

Barra’s first involvement with virtual reality was when he oversaw the development and launch of Xiaomi’s Mi VR Play headset last year.

“Xiaomi CEO Lei Jun always says that the highest calling of an engineer is to make technology breakthroughs quickly and readily available to the widest possible spectrum of humanity. That will be my mission at Facebook and I look forward to building the future of immersive technology with Mark Zuckerberg, Brendan Trexler Iribe, Mike Schroepfer, and the visionaries in the Oculus team,” said Barra, in a Facebook post.

Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg formally welcomed Barra into the fold in a separate Facebook post.

“I’m excited that Hugo Barra is joining Facebook to lead all of our virtual reality efforts, including our Oculus team. Hugo’s in China right now, so here we are together in VR. It seems fitting.

I’ve known Hugo for a long time, starting when he helped develop the Android operating system, to the last few years he’s worked at Xiaomi in Beijing bringing innovative devices to millions of people.

Hugo shares my belief that virtual and augmented reality will be the next major computing platform. They’ll enable us to experience completely new things and be more creative than ever before. Hugo is going to help build that future, and I’m looking forward to having him on our team,” said Zuckerberg.

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Image Credit: Mark Zuckerberg

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