Xiaomi's Hugo Barra to join Facebook's VR team

Hugo Barra, Xiaomi’s former key hire who is set to leave his post as international vice president next month, is going to join Facebook's virtual reality team, Mark Zuckerberg announced Thursday on Facebook."I'm excited that Hugo Barra is joining Facebook to lead all of our virtual reality efforts, including our Oculus team. Hugo's in China right now, so here we are together in VR. It seems fitting," said Zuckerberg."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," he added."I can't wait to get started in building that future and join the team soon. It's been a dream of mine to work in virtual reality even back when AR/VR were just figments of science fiction; now we're taking selfies in virtual worlds :) I learned from Xiaomi CEO Lei Jun that there's no greater calling in our industry than taking breakthrough tech and making it available to the greatest number of people. Really looking forward to doing just that at Facebook — taking VR mainstream — working with you, Brendan, Mike Schroepfer, and the Oculus team!" Barra said in the post.The announcement follows Barra's departure announcement four days ago, in which Barra said he has decided to go back to Silicon Valley, but will remain an advisor to Xiaomi indefinitely.Prior to his job at Xiaomi, Barra was a former star hire at Google who oversaw the development of Android.Read more: Former Google star Hugo Barra resigns from Xiaomi VP role