Vine boss departs Twitter to work on VR at Google

The arrival of consumer level virtual reality is one of the most anticipated tech developments heading our way this year, both for customers and developers alike. The fledgling industry clearly has some major pull, as Vine General Manager Jason Toff has announced that he is leaving the company to work with Google on virtual reality.

Jason Toff didn’t offer an explanation for the move, other than exciting new opportunities to work on. He had been the director of product management at Twitter before heading over to Vine a couple of years ago, and had worked at YouTube before that. Unfortunately for Twitter, which owns Vine, this is just the latest in a number of high profile resignations, which includes Kevin Weil, head of products, and Katie Stanton, Twitter’s chief of global media. The company has been under increasing pressure to recapture its previous growth and generate additional revenue lately, and has seen its stock price fall to new lows.

Personal update! I’m joining Google to work on VR. So much exciting potential there.

— Jason Toff (@jasontoff) January 25, 2016

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To accommodate the recent departures, CEO Jack Dorsey will be reorganizing some of the leading positions within the company. Twitter COO Adam Bain will be taking on responsibilities for the production, media and HR teams, while CTO Adam Messinger will be heading up engineering and consumer product research and development.

Read more: Google creates new virtual reality division4

Turning back to VR. A couple of weeks ago, Clay Bavor was appointed to head up a newly created virtual reality division at Google. We don’t know exactly what the group will be working on, but it seems probable that the company is looking to expand out beyond its low cost Cardboard headset, especially if it wants to compete with emerging platforms from the likes of Oculus and HTC/Valve.