Just three days after the announcement that Hugo Barra is leaving Xiaomi in February to "embark on a new adventure," it has emerged that the face of Xiaomi (soon to be ex-face of Xiaomi) is joining Facebook.
The news was posted by Mark Zuckerberg on his Facebook where he expressed his excitement about the new member of the Facebook family.
Barra will lead Facebook's virtual reality efforts, including the Oculus team.
Mark posted on Facebook:
Hugo shares my belief that virtual and augmented reality will be the next major computing platform. They'll enable us to experience completely new things and be more creative than ever before. Hugo is going to help build that future, and I'm looking forward to having him on our team.
Barra confirmed the news on his Facebook profile where he wrote:
I'm excited to share my next adventure as I return to Silicon Valley-in a couple of months I'll be joining Facebook as VP of virtual reality (VPVR!) and lead the Oculus team. Xiaomi CEO Lei Jun always says that the highest calling of an engineer is to make technology breakthroughs quickly and readily available to the widest possible spectrum of humanity. That will be my mission at Facebook and I look forward to building the future of immersive technology with Mark Zuckerberg, Brendan Trexler Iribe, Mike Schroepfer, and the visionaries in the Oculus team.
Barra has spent the last three and a half years as the public face and Vice President at Xiaomi and before that he worked in the Silicon Valley as Google's Vice President of Android Product Management where he helped to elevate the operating system to where it is today.