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Hugo Barra, a former vice president at Xiaomi and Google, is leaving Xiaomi to lead the VR efforts at Facebook. The move was announced by Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg on (where else?) Facebook last night. Zuckerberg said Barra would "lead all of [Facebook's] virtual reality efforts, including our Oculus team." In a later post, Barra said his title was "VP of Virtual Reality" and that he would "lead the Oculus team."

Barra became well known in the tech world when he worked at Google, where he was the VP of Android. At Google he was generally the company's main presenter for events, where he introduced several Nexus phones and versions of Android. Barra left Google for Xiaomi, where he was "VP of International." Again he was basically the face of the company outside of China and hosted most of the company's product launches. In a post on Facebook, Barra said he left Xiaomi due to a desire to move from China back to Silicon Valley, which he considers his home.

At Xiaomi, Barra launched Xiaomi Global under which the company expanded to India, Indonesia, Singapore, Malaysia, and 20 other markets. Xiaomi partnered with Google to launch the "Mi Box" Android TV device in the US, but the company has yet to bring its smartphones to the US. Xiaomi recently released the stunning Mi Mix in China, but tough times are ahead as Chinese rivals Huawei, Oppo, and Vivo are passing the company in sales. Xiaomi has also said it's skipping out on Mobile World Congress this year.

Oculus has been in the news lately mainly for an ongoing $2 billion trial between it and ZeniMax Media, parent company of Bethesda Softworks and Id Software. ZeniMax claims that John Carmack and others at Oculus stole VR trade secrets that were first developed when Carmack was working at Id software. Carmack called the claims "ridiculous and absurd." According to Carmack, ZeniMax agreed to share code with Oculus and was discussing taking an ownership stake in the VR company, but when talks fell apart, Carmack was told to stop working on VR, which led to his departure from ZeniMax.

At Facebook and Oculus, Barra said he looks forward to "building the future of immersive technology with Mark Zuckerberg, Brendan Trexler Iribe, Mike Schroepfer, and the visionaries in the Oculus team." It's hard to not notice that Barra didn't mention Oculus cofounder Palmer Luckey. Other than testifying at the ZeniMax trial, Luckey has been incommunicado since revelations that he was funding a Pro-Trump "shitposting" political group . Luckey was recently given an " undisclosed new role " at the company, so he still seems to be with Oculus.

In terms of actual products, Oculus' next project seems to be turning the self-contained "Santa Cruz" prototype into a consumer product. In addition to being "wireless" due to packing its own computing power, the Santa Cruz prototype featured "inside out" tracking, a better way to track the headset that doesn't need the separate sensor boxes that the Vive and Oculus Rift use today.