Facebook poaches Google’s AR product director Nikhil Chandhok

Google’s director of Product for AR, Nikhil Chandhok is joining Facebook to lead product management of the Camera team working on augmented reality.

Chandhok worked on Google’s ARCore smartphone augmented reality platform as well as its Daydream VR platform in his position there. "While I'm leaving the team at Daydream and Google, I'm proud of the work we did together. We gave developers ARCore and expanded access to augmented reality tools," he said.

"We also designed foundational aspects of AR platforms and explored how people use AR now and how they'll use it in the future," Chandhok added.

Today is my 1st day at Facebook! There are massive opportunities ahead for AR & I look fwd to joining Facebook as we bring more AR experiences to life - for more people!

— Nikhil Chandhok (@chandhok) January 29, 2018

In a bid to bring the AR experience closer to Android users, Google in August 2017 released a new software development kit (SDK) called "ARCore". The platform renders AR capabilities to existing and future Android phones.