Indian-origin director of Google AR will lead Facebook’s AR platform

Indian-origin Nikhil Chandhok
Indian-origin Nikhil Chandhok. Photo courtesy: Twitter@chandhok

Indian-origin Director of Product for Augmented Reality (AR) at Google Nikhil Chandhok has joined Facebook to lead product management of its camera team working on AR.

Chandhok took to social media with the announcement and shared a post on Facebook saying, “I want to share an exciting update. Today is my first day at Facebook!”

"Now, as I join the Camera/AR team at Facebook, I'm especially interested in building more conversation and momentum in cross-platform camera services," Chandhok posted.

"While I'm leaving the team at Daydream and Google, I'm proud of the work we did together. We gave developers ARCore and expanded access to augmented reality tools," he said.

"We also designed foundational aspects of AR platforms and explored how people use AR now and how they'll use it in the future," Chandhok added.

He also tweeted, “Today is my 1st day at Facebook! There are massive opportunities ahead for AR and I look fwd to joining Facebook as we bring more AR experiences to life – for more people!”

Google, in a bid to bring the AR experience closer to Android users, in August 2017 released a new software development kit (SDK) called "ARCore". The platform renders AR capabilities to existing and future Android phones.

The company built on the fundamental technologies used in Tango, another AR platform by Google but ARCore is scalable across the Android ecosystem as it doesn't require any additional hardware.