Former Oculus CEO and co-founder Brendan Iribe has left the company.

Iribe founded the company along with Palmer Luckey, Michael Antonov and Nate Mitchell back in 2012.

The Kickstarter campaign the company led back then raised $2.4 million and reignited the virtual reality industry - a sector that’s still fighting on today with major multi-million/billion dollar deals.

Oculus itself was acquired by Facebook for 2014 in for $2 billion - a figure that was later revealed to be $3bn based on company targets and retaining key staff.

"First real break"

Iribe stepped down as CEO in 2016 to lead a new division within Facebook that would focus on high-end, PC-powered VR. CTO John Carmack meanwhile led up mobile development.

Iribe did not give any reason for his departure, other than to say this will be “the first real break I’ve taken in over 20 years”.

“We started a revolution that will change the world in ways we can't even envision,” said Iribe in a Facebook post.

“Yet, as far as we’ve come, the journey has just begun. Michael Abrash is right: ‘These are the good old days’. Now is when we get to pioneer the foundation of the next great computing platform and medium - this is our time to be pushing the state-of-the-art onward and upward.

“Every part of VR and AR needs to improve, especially the hardware and core technology, and Oculus has the best team in the world to do that. Although we're still far from delivering the magical smart glasses we all dream about, now they are nearly within our reach.”

His departure comes over a year after Oculus designer and co-founder Palmer Luckey left Facebook. It was unclear if Luckey was ousted by the company or left voluntarily.

The VR visionary had been embroiled in a ZeniMax lawsuit, while he was also tied to a far-right group associated with using inflammatory tactics against Hillary Clinton in the 2016 presidential election campaign.