Facebook has hired Hugo Barra to lead its virtual reality efforts just days after he quit Chinese smartphone maker Xiaomi.

Barra, who led Xiaomi's international expansion, will need to navigate the competitive and young market, where Facebook's Oculus Rift and Gear products have drawn interest.

In the past, Barra helped building an operating system business, with Google's Android, and a hardware brand, with Xiaomi's phones.

"Hugo shares my belief that virtual and augmented reality will be the next major computing platform," Zuckerberg said in a Facebook post. "They'll enable us to experience completely new things and be more creative than ever before."

"It's been a dream of mine to work in virtual reality even back when AR/VR were just figments of science fiction; now we're taking selfies in virtual worlds," Barra said in comments on Zuckerberg's Facebook post.