John Carmack sees a future in the Oculus Rift

John Carmack, legendary programmer and technology gadabout, is joining the Oculus Rift team. Oculus Rift announced that Carmack will be taking a position as their new Chief Technology Officer. He will be working from their new Dallas office as soon as it opens. Carmack issued a statement to the Rift 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!”

In separate statements, Bethesda and id Software confirmed that Carmack will still hold his leadership position at id.

Carmack put his other technology-related project, Armadillo Aereospace, into “hibernation” following a failed rocket launch in January.