Twitter’s director of AR/VR leaves the company

The head of Twitter’s AR/VR team announced today via a tweet that he is leaving the social media site after 18 months.

Alessandro Sabatelli joined Twitter in June of 2016 after leaving a virtual reality startup he led which created music-focused VR experiences. Sabatelli had previously worked as a designer at Apple. We’ve reached out to Sabatelli for more details on what he’s up to next.

Twitter hasn’t always been the quickest in its product development and the AR/VR scene (which is very much in its infancy still) hasn’t seen the company make too many daring moves. While Apple, Facebook, Snap and Google have shown off AR or VR developer platforms, there’s been little movement from Twitter in the arena.

The company has been slower to approach AR content creation features like selfie masks which have been on full display in competing products from both Snapchat and Facebook. The company’s biggest foray into virtual reality during the past couple years was likely the team’s work on Live 360 video in Periscope.

This has, more generally, been a period of a lot of movement in the AR/VR space largely as a result of companies reshaping their visions for how they see product and feature developments. Last week, Facebook brought on a new director of AR who previously worked at Google.