Facebook is growing quickly in Seattle, announcing this morning that it has topped 500 employees at its existing office next to Interstate 5, and confirming plans to move into a space across town with room for as many 2,000 employees. But that’s just part of the company’s story here.
Oculus VR, the virtual reality company acquired by the social networking giant for $2 billion last year, has reached 100 employees in the region, working in offices in Redmond and Seattle’s University District, a Facebook representative tells GeekWire. That’s apart from the 500 Facebook employees at the company’s main office.
As part of the Facebook event this morning, Oculus program manager Bernard Yee provided new details about the Oculus operations in the region, and explained what’s driving the growth.
“Our team has people who worked on the Avengers movie, people who worked on Halo, people who worked at Valve,” said Yee, who works on the company’s games experiences software team. “That’s actually one of the great benefits of being in Seattle. There’s probably no other city — maybe in the world, certainly other than Montreal — no other city where these sorts of people are available.”
Yee himself is an example. A former senior producer for Plants vs. Zombies 2, he joined Oculus from PopCap Games last year. Oculus also hired former Valve virtual reality evangelist Michael Abrash last year. In addition, the company last year acquired Carbon Design, the product engineering firm behind devices including the Xbox 360 controller.
The three main areas of focus for Oculus in the Seattle region are hardware development, games experiences software development, and R&D.
Gaming experiences are key to adoption of the Oculus technology, he said. “Without software, the headset is just a piece of plastic and electronics. You need the experience to drive the value home to people. We’re the last mile in converting people to VR.”
At the same time, he pointed to the role of R&D in keeping Oculus ahead of rivals such as Magic Leap and Microsoft, which announced its HoloLens blended reality goggles last month. “This is an area where any hardware advantage is easily gained or lost, so we have to maintain pressure on research and development,” he said.
Some Oculus employees are based in the main Facebook Seattle office, but the Oculus operations in the Seattle region are centered largely in Redmond and the University District.
It’s not clear if the Oculus operations will ultimately be consolidated in the new Facebook offices on Dexter Avenue after Facebook moves there next year. “It’s complicated,” said Paul Carduner, the Facebook Seattle site lead, when asked that question during the briefing this morning.
