image credit : evrydayvr on Flickr

Oculus co-founder and ex CEO Brendan Iribe is now leaving Facebook as per an official announcement which states of taking a “real break” for the first time in 20 years and an excitement for the next chapter.

Iribe is leaving Oculus after 6 years and notably at a time when Facebook has seen departure of key executives who took positions of at the company after high-profile acquisitions. Both WhatsApp co-founders Brian Acton and Jan Koum as well as Instagram creators Kevin Systrom and Mike Krieger have left the company in periods starting from last year after what is reported to be internal clashes concerning operations of the services they lead.

Brendan Iribe speaks at TechCrunch Disrupt NY 2014 image credit : TechCrunch on Flickr

As per TechCrunch, Iribe is departing the company following internal shakeups which saw the cancellation of Oculus’ next generation “Rift 2” PC-powered VR headset. The report states of Iribe and the Facebook executive team as having “fundamentally different views on the future of Oculus that grew deeper over time” with the Oculus co-founder also not interested in a “race to the bottom” in terms of performance.

Iribe’s Facebook post which announced his departure made no mentions of any official reasons for leaving and contained kind words for the Oculus/Facebook teams he worked with.

“I’m deeply proud and grateful for all that we’ve done together. We assembled one of the greatest research and engineering teams in history, delivered the first step of true virtual presence with Oculus Rift and Touch, and inspired an entirely new industry. We started a revolution that will change the world in ways we can’t even envision.” Iribe wrote.

Another Oculus founder Palmer Luckey (pictured left) left the company last year image credit : Web Summit on Flickr

“Yet, as far as we’ve come, the journey has just begun. Michael Abrash is right: “These are the good old days”. Now is when we get to pioneer the foundation of the next great computing platform and medium – this is our time to be pushing the state-of-the-art onward and upward. Every part of VR and AR needs to improve, especially the hardware and core technology, and Oculus has the best team in the world to do that. Although we’re still far from delivering the magical smart glasses we all dream about, now they are nearly within our reach.”

Prior to heading Oculus, Iribe kicked off his career as a game programmer and worked on the user interface of Civilization IV. He was co-founder/CEO of Scaleform, a UI technology provider for PC games acquired by Autodesk in 2011 and later went on to lead the product team at cloud gaming company Gaikai which was acquired by Sony for $380 million in 2012.

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