Hugo Barra: Facebook's virtual reality business gets a new leader

Facebook’s virtual reality effort, including its big bet on the virtual reality goggles maker Oculus VR, has a new leader.

Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook’s chief executive, said in a post on Wednesday that Hugo Barra, a former executive at Google and the Chinese phone maker Xiaomi, was joining 

Facebook to lead its virtual reality business. The move puts to rest questions about who would assume direction of the efforts after Oculus ran into several hurdles, including an 

intellectual property lawsuit and leadership changes. “Hugo shares my belief that virtual and augmented reality will be the next major computing platform,” Zuckerberg wrote in the post. 

“Hugo is going to help build that future.”

Facebook paid $2 billion to acquire Oculus almost three years ago, with Zuckerberg proclaiming virtual reality the next big thing. While Oculus has released its virtual reality goggles 

and there is interest in the field, sales of the headsets are sluggish, and even Zuckerberg has said Facebook will most likely need to invest an additional $3 billion in content and 

development over the next few years in hopes of seeing virtual reality take off.

Facebook’s desire to have a major stake in the technology undergirding virtual reality partly reflected the fact that it was not able to do the same thing in mobile, even though it has 

managed to profit handsomely from mobile advertising. But the most capable virtual reality headsets are expensive and require powerful personal computers to support them. Breakout 

applications, including video games, haven’t materialized because developers have been reluctant to pour resources into an uncertain market. While Facebook does not provide 

sales figures for the $599 Oculus Rift headset, which was released to the public last year, analysts believe they are slow. One research firm, SuperData Research, estimated the 

company sold only about 355,000 by the end of last year.

The social network could face as much as $2 billion in damages if it loses the suit.

This month Zuckerberg said at the trial for the lawsuit in a federal courthouse in Texas, “I don’t think that good virtual reality is fully there yet.”

Mr. Barra is well known in Silicon Valley. As a Google executive several years ago, he helped grow the search giant’s Android mobile business. In 2013, he left to join Xiaomi, then an 

up-and-coming phone maker in China, and became its international face. He oversaw Xiaomi’s international expansion to emerging markets including India, Myanmar and Brazil.

But the high-flying smartphone maker, once valued at $45 billion, has slowed as it has battled other Chinese hardware companies like Huawei and OnePlus. Recently, Xiaomi stopped 

sharing its annual sales numbers, after the chief executive, Lei Jun, admitted the company had expanded “too fast.” Mr. Barra left Xiaomi this month.

“The highest calling of an engineer is to make technology breakthroughs quickly and readily available to the widest possible spectrum of humanity,” Mr. Barra posted on Wednesday. 

“That will be my mission at Facebook.”