Nat Brown, Xbox and Valve veteran, has joined Apple

What you need to know

Xbox co-creator Nat Brown announced he has joined Apple.
Brown also worked on Valve's VR team
Brown said he's excited to focus on "all applications of graphics."

Nat Brown, a Valve veteran and co-creator of the original Xbox, announced he has joined Apple. Brown broke the news in a Twitter thread, in which he hinted at his role with the Cupertino company.

"A major thread of my career is an obsession with platform ecosystems and systems engineering," Brown said to start off the thread.

I was always fascinated with how hard games push software and hardware platforms in UI/UX, memory, storage, and network requirements, real-time rendering, low-latency input, audio quality, and multimedia generally.
— Nat Brown (@natbro) July 29, 2019

games and AR/VR push systems really, really hard. so making games & AR/VR content work well makes platforms better for all types of software. often games spin off new UX concepts, or the game hardware supply chain (like GPUs) ends up powering completely new solutions like AI/ML.
— Nat Brown (@natbro) July 29, 2019

Over the past few years, Apple has slowly started to explore the world of AR, as well as gaming with Arcade, which is set to launch later this year. Brown could fit right into that, especially with Apple expected to launch iPhones with time-of-flight 3D sensors in 2020.

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In addition to projects like ARKit, Apple is said to be working on a mixed reality headset, with reports from March suggesting new hardware could arrive sometime next year. Apple could use Brown's expertise to help make its AR glasses a reality.

"I'm looking forward to continuing work on my obsessions by focusing on all applications of graphics, and working with any of you using graphics on Apple platforms," Brown said.