Developer John Carmack announced his departure from Facebook group Meta over the weekend after an internal memo to the American newspaper New York Times was leaked.
Carmack has served as Meta's chief advisor on virtual reality (VR) matters - a division central to Mark Zuckerberg's efforts to create a virtual work and living environment with his Metaverse.
Gregory Bruner
Editor in Business.
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Carmack began his "decade in VR" as chief technology officer at Oculus VR.
In 2012, the company launched a crowdfunding campaign on the Kickstarter platform for VR glasses that could be marketed to private individuals.
With this, Oculus started a trend that other companies such as HTC or Sony have followed in the past decade with their own VR glasses.
Carmack joined the company after successfully financing the Oculus Rift VR glasses, with whom he had previously conducted technical demonstrations.
Until then, Carmack was head of the game developer id Software, which made a name for itself in the 1990s with games like "Wolfenstein 3D" and "Doom".
In 2014, Oculus VR was acquired by Facebook and later rebranded to Reality Labs.
Workhorse at inefficient company
Carmack's goals for Reality Labs were to develop VR glasses that were economical, wearable and had a high-resolution display.
He has largely achieved these goals, he writes in his message, which he also published on Facebook.
However, the inefficient way in which the Meta group was run led him to resign from his position there.
What bothered him, for example, was that he recognized problems early on and denounced them, but they were only tackled by the upper management levels after processes had been damaged.
Carmack's reputation as a talented developer and workhorse is legendary.
In interviews and podcasts, he likes to state that he has to work much longer than eight hours to be satisfied with himself.
In addition to his development work, Carmack also founded the aerospace start-up Armadillo Aerospace, which, however, ceased operations in 2013.
Now Carmack wants to devote himself to his new start-up, Keen Technologies.
After VR as an important step in computer technology for him, he wants to take on the development of artificial general intelligence with Keen Technologies, i.e. artificial intelligence that comes close to human.
