On Thursday, May 30, 2013 another brilliant mind was taken from the tech industry.

Andrew Reisse, the co-founder of Oculus VR, was struck by a car while crossing a crosswalk and killed in the incident.  The car responsible for his death was involved in a high-speed chase with the authorities when it happened.

According to authorities, the driver of the vehicle and other suspects were members of a gang and are on probation.  The driver will be facing murder charges.

The Oculus team posted a tribute to Reisse on its site to inform others of this tragic demise and his contributions to the gaming, tech, and photography industry.

The short but meaningful life of Andrew Reisse

At the age of 19, Reisse helped start Scaleform,  a developer providing middleware for use in the video game industry, which was acquired by Autodesk in 2011.  This acquisition led to Reisse and other members of Scaleform to abandon it as Autodesk wanted him to sign an agreement that would hinder him from contributing to the open source community which he was very active it.

This led to Reisse joining Brendan Iribe, who he previously worked with “to make a UI system for game developers, which was first used in Civilization IV and would later become Scaleform GFx–used by thousands of video games.”

Michael Antonov, who he met during his freshman year in college, and Nate Mitchell, soon joined Reisse and Iribe at Gaikai and worked on its cloud gaming platform and SDK before the four eventually left and started working on Oculus RV.

Earlier this year, Oculus VR unveiled the Oculus Rift at CES 2013.  The Oculus Rift is a wearable computing device that would immerse gamers into a different world.  The device was supposed to go on sale last March but has not been released yet though interested parties can pre-order the device now.

According to the company’s post, Reisse led the Oculus SDK, the Unreal Engine integration, Hawken VR, and nearly every demo the company has shown since its inception, but  “Despite all his work, he never bragged or boasted. When he wasn’t programming at the office, he was learning, reading his favorite web site–slashdot.org–or helping other teammates brainstorm and innovate.”

“Andrew was taken from us long before his time. Words cannot express how sorely he will be missed or how deeply our sympathy runs for his family.

Andrew, you will always be in our thoughts and never forgotten. We love you, Reisse,” the post stated in closing.

To view some of Reisse’s works, check out http://www.reisse.net/ to see how he views the world through his lenses.

Our sympathies go out to all of Reisse’s family and friends.