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Oculus VR News | March 19, 2024

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Oculus Appoints Amir Frenkel as New Head of Computer Vision

Oculus Appoints Amir Frenkel as New Head of Computer Vision

Image courtesy of: Oculus

FRΛNK R.

Over the last several months there have been some major restructuring changes at Oculus ranging from the departure of key members of the company to the shutdown of its entire Story Studio division. Now, another new change has taken place at Oculus, as reported by TechCrunch.

Amir Frenkel, who joined Facebook as Director of Engineering back in November 2016 has officially taken over the role as the new Head of Computer Vision at Oculus, according to his LinkedIn page.

Frenkel replaces Don Katz, an early employee of Oculus that held the position since 2014 and was arrested in late December on suspicion of allegedly trying to solicit sex from an undercover police officer posing as an underage girl. Katz pleaded not guilty to charges of “attempted commercial sexual abuse of a minor” in January, and a trial is set to take place later in July, according to court documents. A spokesperson for Oculus has confirmed that Katz is now no longer with the company.

With Frenkel taking on the new position, he will surely play an important role in leading Oculus’ development of new advanced computer vision technologies to further drive the company’s virtual reality and augmented reality initiatives forward. His past work includes Head of Wearables Engineering at Google and Director of Software Development at Amazon’s Lab126.

This comes as just the latest change in which Oculus has seen its early and prominent employees either shifting roles or exiting the company—including co-founders Palmer Luckey and Brendan Iribe. Iribe served as Oculus’ CEO until December when he abruptly stepped down from his role to lead the company’s PC-based VR division and Luckey left the company altogether fairly recently.

The company is currently being led by ex-Xiaomi executive Hugo Barra who joined last month as Facebook’s VP of Virtual Reality and is overseeing all of the VR efforts at both Facebook and Oculus.