Unlike its rivals at Facebok, Twitter has shown little interest in virtual reality, but it appears that the company is finally ready to make a play and an ex-Apple designer is leading the charge.
Twitter has hired Alessandro Sabatelli as its first Director of VR and AR where he has been charged to “empower us all in the spatial computing revolution.”
During his time as a designer at Apple, Sabatelli helped create the user interfaces for iOS, OS X and watchOS. He also assisted in the making of iTune’s music visualizer.
The hiring was first spotted on LinkedIn by Upload VR which also discovered that Sabatelli has a number of impressive patents attributed to his name related to VR, including some contextual interfaces and location based notification system that were made during his days at Apple.
Before coming to Twitter, Sabatelli worked for the VR and AR company IXOMOXI, focusing on creating visually enhanced interpretations of the real world. The company’s first VR app created visual filters for VR devices.
So what will Twitter look like in VR? Maybe VR users will be able to float through an endless see of tweets. Or maybe in the future we’ll all be posting 360 videos to the platform instead of 140 character musings. Twitter’s not saying what type of products Sabatelli is working on, but we probably won’t see it for years.
