Facebook Taps The Sims’ Rachel Rubin Franklin To Head Social VR Team
Former Electronic Arts VP Rachel Rubin Frankin has moved to Facebook as the new head of Social VR. CTO Mike Schroepfer announced the hire in a Facebook blog post Tuesday.
Franklin will work with other members of Facebook Social VR team including Michael Booth and Lucy Bradshaw. “It is a blast to fuse the experience of people who have developed many successful immersive online worlds with engineers who have decades of collective experience building Facebook,” Schroepfer wrote in the Facebook post. “As we demonstrated, we have ambitious goals and have lots to do, so if you are a game developer, designer, or artist … come join us!”
Facebook has been invested in VR following its acquisition of Oculus VR in 2014, and last week at the Oculus Connect conference Mark Zuckerberg, Booth and Bradshaw demo-ed the progress of the Facebook Social VR system that now features Sims-like avatars (check out the video below). VR has also been a buzzy topic in Hollywood of late, with the VR on the Lot conference set for Thursday-Friday at Paramount.
Franklin had been with EA since 2011, where she served as an executive producer, GM, and VP on the studio running the blockbuster game The Sims 4, which was the best-selling PC game of 2014 and 2015. She previously worked at cloud gaming startup OnLive, as well as game studio Activision.
Here’s Zuckerberg at the conference keynote:
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