Facebook Recruits Executive Producer Rachel Franklin of ‘The Sims’ as Head of Social VR
Through the eye’s of Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook envisions to be the largest social VR platform in the future. With the tall task of achieving this goal, Facebook recently hired Rachel Rubin Franklin, former VP of ‘The Sims’ at EA. Rachel was highly visible throughout the Oculus Connect 3 conference that took place last week. She was a prominent figure in displaying Facebook’s VR technology.
Rachel Franklin has tremendous background in working with social gaming experiences as she was the VP and executive producer of ‘The Sims’ which is one of the most interactive social games. In fact, EA sold over 5 million copies of Sims 4 worldwide making it the best selling PC game in 2014 and 2015. Mike Schoepfer, CTO of Facebook, made a post on his personal account in welcoming the newly acquired talent.
“Last week our team welcomed Rachel Rubin Franklin – formerly of EA/Maxis – adding to the roster of talent that already includes Michael Booth and Lucy Bradshaw, who were on stage with Mark, and others who worked behind the scenes. 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. 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!”
Rachel Franklin will work alongside Mike Schoepfer and Lucy Bradshaw (former predecessor at EA who jumped ship to facebook in 2015) in creating the forecasted dream by Mark Zuckerberg at facebook. Although it’s a long road ahead, they seem to have figured out the core team in developing facebook’s social VR platform. The technology looked promising through their team’s live demonstrations.
Facebook hopes to breakthrough mixed reality where you can intertwine the real and virtual world together to achieve a higher level social interactivity.
You’ll be able to invite your friends to go visit the real and virtual world together, whether that may be your house or 1,000 ft. under water. You’ll have the option to do so if Facebook achieves certain thresholds in virtual reality technology. We look forward to seeing what Rachel Franklin and the VR team at facebook can achieve in the coming years.