Untethered Android mobile VR headset developer GameFace Labs has today announced an eclectic group of new hires from the world of gaming and hardware hacking. Ex Sony London Studio Head David Ranyard, infamous iPhone ans PS3 hacker George Hotz (aka Geohot) and Ex Mojang developer Ryan Holtz are to join the company.

GameFace Labs are to present their latest untethered mobile virtual reality headset and accompanying software at the first VRDC conference, which begins today alongside the Game Developer Conference.

See Also: GameFace “Guarantees” Latency Equal to Gear VR, Mark 6 Prototype Field of View Impresses
See Also: GameFace “Guarantees” Latency Equal to Gear VR, Mark 6 Prototype Field of View Impresses

We’ve been following the GameFace team since 2014 and have watched the companies technology evolve rapidly since. We last went hands-on with the company’s newly launched ‘Head Mounted Console’, the nVidia K1 powered EP1, last year at E3 and were impressed with the units portability, display and its sizeable field of view.

The company are today announcing that the organisation is to grow its team, adding several interesting names from the world of VR, gaming and technology.

The first is a name which should be familiar to anyone who has followed Sony’s Project Morpheus project, now known as PlayStation VR, since its launch at GDC in 2014. David Ranyard led Sony’s London Studio responsible for a large part of the PSVR’s early software R&D. His team produced many PlayStation VR demos, including the excellent Street Luge and more recently the London Heist series. Ranyard is to join GameFace Labs as an advisory board member alongside 21st Century Fox Futurist Ted Schilowitz and Yahoo Co-founder Randy Adams.

Also joining the board is infamous hacker George Hotz (aka Geohot). Hotz became famous for his world first iPhone IOS and PlayStation hacks which allowed users to circumvent restrictions to run ‘homebrew’ software on the devices. More recently Hotz was involved in driver-less car project Comma, based on Nvidia’s Tegra mobile chipset.

Finally, joining GameFace Labs as CTO is Ex Mojang developer Ryan Holtz who led changes on Minecraft‘s rendering engine from 2013. Holtz brings expertise in OpenGL as well as experience pooled from previous roles at King and Scaleform.

Road to VR will be on the ground in San Francisco at VRDC and GDC this week.

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Paul James
Based in the UK, Paul has been immersed in interactive entertainment for the best part of 27 years and has followed advances in gaming with a passionate fervour. His obsession with graphical fidelity over the years has had him branded a ‘graphics whore’ (which he views as the highest compliment) more than once and he holds a particular candle for the dream of the ultimate immersive gaming experience. Having followed and been disappointed by the original VR explosion of the 90s, he then founded RiftVR.com to follow the new and exciting prospect of the rebirth of VR in products like the Oculus Rift. Paul joined forces with Ben to help build the new Road to VR in preparation for what he sees as VR’s coming of age over the next few years.
  • gabriel garcia

    There may be a little typo there in the beginning.

  • Dirk

    Gameface have been showing ‘prototypes’ for over two years now. My take is that it’s all hype – looking at LinkedIn, they are a 5 person company that clearly don’t have the hw and sw engineering expertise to pull off building a complex product like this.These new hires don’t add any of the needed expertise either. To be brutal, most of their team have no relevant experience at all.

    Their previous venture 3Dizzy made similar wild claims and never shipped anything either.