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Hugo Barra Is Moving To Facebook In Order To Lead Oculus

Hugo Barra has just confirmed that he has accepted a job offer from Facebook, as he will be leading the company’s Oculus team. Google’s and Xiaomi’s former executive confirmed via Twitter that he will be moving to Facebook and become the company’s VP of virtual reality (VPVR), and lead ‘Team Oculus’. Mr. Barra also shared an image along with this post, and if you take a look at it (above this article), you’ll get to see Hugo Barra and Mark Zuckerberg side by side, well, their cartoonish variants. This image actually represents Oculus’ VR project (Facebook Messenger VR video calls) which was shown off at Oculus’ Connect event last year, Hugo Barra and Mark Zuckerberg are essentially hanging out in virtual reality here, which is why their characters appear cartoonish. This is a nice way to let people know what’s going on since Hugo Barra is still in China.

Now, to give you some perspective, 3 days ago, Hugo Barra announced via his Twitter page that he will be leaving Xiaomi in February after the Chinese New Year. Mr. Barra also confirmed that he is going back to Silicon Valley, but he did not reveal to which company is he moving to. Many people suggested that he might be going back to Google, but as you can see, that is not the case. Hugo Barra was Xiaomi’s Global Vice President for quite some time, he has been employed by the company for 3.5 years, and has helped Xiaomi rise quite a bit. Xiaomi had expanded to a number of regions thus far, and Mr. Barra claims that they have everything they need in order to push towards the global market, including a very capable team. Xiaomi is still not officially selling their smartphones (at least not directly) in Europe or the US, and it will be interesting to see how long will it take them to push their products to those regions.

Before he moved to Xiaomi, Hugo Barra was an executive over at Google and he was present at more or less every Google event, and spoke on stage about Google’s new products. Hugo Barra was an important figure over at Google, same goes for Xiaomi, and now he’s about to lead Oculus, one of the largest companies out there when it comes to VR. Oculus now has some serious competition in the VR sector, mainly from HTC and their Vive team, but Oculus also has Facebook’s backing. It remains to be seen how will Hugo Barra influence Oculus and their products moving forward.