Friday, May 2, 2014

Oculus’s Carmack Working on a Comic Book App


Videogame pioneer John Carmack may be at the center of a potential legal dispute involving the virtual-reality headset maker Oculus, but it hasn’t slowed his creative impulses.

Carmack sent a tweet Thursday saying he is building what he described as a VR comic book shop. “Not kidding,” he added.

The Twitter post came after Carmack had referenced a new set of coding tools by Disney’s Marvel division that integrate information from its library of comics into other apps.

Carmac did not elaborate on his plans. An Oculus spokesman had no immediate comment.

Of course, the idea of a visually compelling virtually reality app makes sense. Before Carmack was even hired at Oculus, he worked with the its founder, Palmer Luckey, to create virtual reality demonstration apps in 2012. One of the first demonstrations created for the VR headset was a scene from one of Carmack’s recent games.

Carmack’s involvement with the first Oculus designs are at the heart of a dispute between his old employer, ZeniMax, and Facebook, which in March said it agreed to buy Oculus for $2 billion. ZeniMax is claiming rights to intellectual property that powers the Oculus device. ZeniMax has sent “formal notice of legal rights,” and is seeking compensation.

Carmack is best known as a driving force behind ground-breaking titles such as “Wolfenstein 3D” and “Doom,” which revolutionized the videogame industry when they were released a couple of decades ago.

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