The Oculus Rift Team announced today that John Carmack will be officially joining them as their new Chief Technology Officer (CTO). Carmack co-founded id Software, served as lead programmer on Wolfenstein 3D, Doom, and the Quake series, and is one of the pioneers of 3D graphics. It has not been confirmed yet whether Carmack has left id Software or not (ninja edit: Carmack will not leave id Software, though his role remains unknown. He will be working full time in the Oculus Rift Team).
Carmack had this to say to the Oculus community:
“I have fond memories of the development work that led to a lot of great things in modern gaming – the intensity of the first person experience, LAN and internet play, game mods, and so on. Duct taping a strap and hot gluing sensors onto Palmer’s early prototype Rift and writing the code to drive it ranks right up there. Now is a special time. I believe that VR will have a huge impact in the coming years, but everyone working today is a pioneer. The paradigms that everyone will take for granted in the future are being figured out today; probably by people reading this message. It’s certainly not there yet. There is a lot more work to do, and there are problems we don’t even know about that will need to be solved, but I am eager to work on them. It’s going to be awesome!”
As the team noted, Carmack has been a part of the Oculus Rift project and a true believer in the future of virtual reality since the beginning. He was the first developer to actually integrate the Rift into a game (Doom 3), back when the hardware was just a hand-held prototype without an SDK.
We are pretty sure that after this news, the interest for Oculus Rift will skyrocket.
Currently there is no ETA yet about the consumer version of the Oculus Rift, but we hope to see one at the end of 2013. The estimated price will be around $300-$350.
John is the founder and Editor in Chief at DSOGaming. He is a PC gaming fan and highly supports the modding and indie communities. Before creating DSOGaming, John worked on numerous gaming websites. While he is a die-hard PC gamer, his gaming roots can be found on consoles. John loved – and still does – the 16-bit consoles, and considers SNES to be one of the best consoles. Still, the PC platform won him over consoles. That was mainly due to 3DFX and its iconic dedicated 3D accelerator graphics card, Voodoo 2. John has also written a higher degree thesis on the “The Evolution of PC graphics cards.”
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