Eric Romo, a pioneer in the world of social virtual reality, has joined the social VR team of Facebook, the exec announced Monday in this Facebook post.

Romo was a co-founder and the former CEO of Altspace VR, a social VR startup founded in 2013 that counted Comcast Ventures among its early financial backers. AltspaceVR shut down temporarily last summer after efforts to secure more funding failed. Microsoft acquired AltspaceVR last October, planning to use the buy to help it build a “mixed reality community.”

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Road to VR reported that Romo is joining Facebook as director of product at the company’s social VR team, which built Facebook Spaces, a social VR platform that is currently in beta.  

“It wasn't an easy decision, but I left AltspaceVR with confidence that the team is well-placed to continue pushing forward the promise of virtual communication as part of the Microsoft mixed reality ecosystem,” Romo noted in the post about his new role at Facebook, noting that he will stay in the San Francisco Bay area. “I can't wait to see what they'll do next, and wish them all the best.”

Facebook’s VR efforts also extend deeply into Oculus, the VR headset/platform company that FB acquired in 2014 for $2 billion.

Romo is coming on board at Facebook amid Oculus’s plans to introduce a wireless, standalone VR headset called the Oculus Go.

Coincidentally, Romo, during a keynote at New Bay Media’s VR 20/20 event in October 2016, predicted that standalone platforms “optimized for VR” would become the dominant form for virtual reality by 2020 and outsell the current wave of headsets that are paired with smartphones, PCs and gaming consoles.

RELATED: AltspaceVR CEO Predicts the Road Ahead

Linden Lab, the company that built and developed Second Life, is well on to its next chapter as it opens up a “creator beta” of Sansar, a new social VR platform, to the public.

Sansar is initially being supported on two high-end VR platforms, the HTC Vive and the Oculus Rift, and can also run in 3D/360 on Windows PCs, so access is not being limited only to consumers with virtual reality headsets.

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Anyone with the right technical set up can enter Sansar for free under a basic set-up, though consumers can also buy additional capacity and customer support to creators through paid subscriptions that start at $9.99 per month.

Linden Lab said Sansar initially is comprised of a virtual Atlas that contains “hundreds” of VR experiences. Examples of those environments include Apollo 11- Sea of Tranquility, an experience from Loot Interactive that aims to create a “realistic and true-to-scale recreation of the Apollo 11 moon landing site.” Another one, Valencia (from Theanine) is a “surreal city with sprawling skyscrapers that defy the laws of physics,” while Secrets of the WorldWhale (from Teager) lets users explore an “eerie world on the back of an ancient whale and discover hidden treasure.”

Linden Lab said each “instance” of an experience is currently set up to allow more than 35 concurrent avatars.

Sansar also supports customizable avatars, and has partnered with Speech Graphics to provide what it calls “accurate avatar lip-syncing and facial animations” that enter play as users speak into the microphones on their head-mounted displays or audio headsets. Sansar also aims to emulate hand and arm movements by integrating IKinema’s middleware.

Similar in some ways to Second Life, the new Sansar world features a wide array of environments that are underpinned by an electronic economy whereby users can buy and sell digital items in “Sansar Dollars,” the unit of trade for the platform. In the beta creator version, for example, users can buy an astronaut suit for a female avatar for 500 Sansar Dollars, or a western hat for a male avatar for 100 Sansar Dollars.

“Sansar democratizes social VR,” Ebbe Altberg, CEO of Linden Lab, said in a statement. “Until now, complexity and cost has limited who could create and publish in this medium, and Sansar dramatically changes that.”

Linden Lab started to seek applications for its creator preview in May 2016, hopeful at the time that a commercial rollout would happen by the end of 2016.

RELATED: Project Sansar’s Next Step

Linden Labs is pushing ahead with Sansar amid hopes that social VR is set to reach the next level as next-gen platforms become more mainstream.

AltspaceVR, a social VR startup that included Comcast Ventures among its backers, announced last week that it was shutting down on August 3 after the startup’s attempts to secure a new round of funding fell through.

RELATED: AltSpaceVR Shutting Down