With over $100 million in funding, Oculus has expanded its virtual reality ambitions a little bit. Now, the startup is also expanding its offices. Today, the company announced that it will open a new office in the Seattle area, home to Microsoft, Amazon, and Valve Corporation.
Oculus VR expands to Seattle to attract even more talent
is a senior editor and founding member of The Verge who covers gadgets, games, and toys. He spent 15 years editing the likes of CNET, Gizmodo, and Engadget.
The move isn’t particularly surprising, because Oculus VR has been working closely with Valve on virtual reality, and appears to be hiring people away from Valve’s own VR research and development team. Last year, Oculus poached Tom Forsyth, who helped port Team Fortress 2 to VR, and today the company’s adding Valve’s Atman Binstock, who created the Steam Dev Days demo, as a new Chief Architect. The company also appears to have hired Boone Calhoun, an Seattle-based Amazon software engineer who recreated the Star Wars Death Star trench run as an Oculus Rift experience.
Oculus expands
Seattle isn’t the only place that Oculus is expanding, however. The company is also finalizing the location of an office in Dallas, Texas to accomodate chief technical officer John Carmack’s team. Carmack, the original backer of the Oculus Rift idea, left his company id Software after the owners reportedly refused to let him work on VR games there. Now, Linkedin shows that at least four other id Software veterans now work for Oculus in the Dallas area.
In addition to the planned Seattle and Dallas offices, the company also intends to move out of its current Irvine headquarters to a larger space in Southern California. Oculus now employs over 100 people in total, including full-time and contract employees.
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