Inside his garage workshop, Luckey started small, custom-building his own computers. But before long he moved on to bigger—and often more dangerous—projects. “I burned myself a ton,” he says. “I’ve blown off my eyebrows a few times.” Once, when he was experimenting with a high-voltage Tesla coil, he caused a short circuit, nearly electrocuting himself and scarring his wrist with an electrical burn. On another occasion, he accidentally discharged a laser into his eye and burned a tiny blind spot on his retina. He says he doesn’t notice it, though. As he’d learn later when he studied VR, the human brain is excellent at correcting errors in our vision.
A favorite pastime involved “modding” video game consoles—taking vintage hardware and modifying it with newer components or to fit into portable, battery-powered cases. When he was sixteen, he cofounded a website called ModRetro Forums to discuss the hobby with like-minded hobbyists around the globe.
“I’m a huge fan of online communities, and I don’t think that I’d be where I was today without them,” Luckey says. “If you have one person in their garage and they’re trying to figure out how to do something, they’re gonna have a long path ahead of them. But on ModRetro, there were a lot of projects where you’d have twenty, thirty people all working together. That kind of collaborative problem solving is really powerful.”
Life outside of the garage revolved around playing video games (Super Smash Bros., Chrono Trigger, and GoldenEye 007 were among his favorites) and consuming science fiction (particularly cyberpunk stories like The Matrix and The Lawnmower Man).
“Virtual reality is in so much science fiction, across a wide variety of stories, that even if you’re not particularly interested in VR, if you’re a sci-fi enthusiast you end up learning a lot about it,” says Luckey. “That’s what happened. I grew up my whole life thinking virtual reality was very cool, and I thought that it must exist in secret military labs somewhere.”
Inspired, Luckey went hunting for evidence of the arcane technology. He scoured eBay sales for outdated and abandoned bits of VR hardware, and slowly amassed an impressive collection. In one score, he bought a $97,000 headset for only $87.
To fund his efforts, he started a business repairing broken iPhones. “First I was just fixing individual people’s phones,” Luckey says, “but then I realized that a much better way to do it was to go on eBay, buy lots of five or ten broken iPhones, and then fix up as many as I could and resell them.” The scheme made him more than $30,000, and he poured nearly all of it back into his hobby.
But Luckey wasn’t satisfied with collecting other people’s failed VR experiments. He wanted a system that worked, so he started pulling pieces from old gadgets made by companies like Vuzix and eMagin, and hacked them together into something original. “I was modifying existing gear really heavily, using new lenses, trying to swap lenses from one system into another,” he says. “I built some shitty stuff.”
With time, his work improved. In 2009—when he was only seventeen—Luckey started building a VR headset he called the PR1, or Prototype One. “The entire optical system was all custom for that head-mounted display,” he says. “That was the first time where I tried to build something new from the ground up.”
On November 21, 2010, Luckey announced his project in an online forum for 3-D gaming enthusiasts called MTBS3D, or “Meant to Be Seen in 3-D.” He explained that he’d built the device into the shell of a MRG2.2 head-mounted display, originally manufactured in 1996 by Winnipeg-based Liquid Image Corporation, but heavily modified it with improvements including a new LCD screen, new lenses, and a new sound system. “I would go on and on and on about all the revisions I went through in the build process,” Luckey wrote, “but I do not want to bore you.”
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You might expect a homeschooled kid who spent his childhood hacking cell phones and inventing computer hardware to be awkward and introverted in conversation. But Palmer Luckey is charming, voluble, and funny. He’s laid-back and casual, almost always dressed like he’s come straight from the shore, in cargo shorts and brightly colored beachwear. The soles of his feet are often black with dirt from treading around barefoot; if he wears shoes at all, they’re likely to be sandals.
He studied public speaking and opera as a kid, and aspired to work as a singing gondolier for tourists on Long Beach’s Naples Island, but he didn’t make it through training. “I was terrible,” he says. He worked another part-time job cleaning the boats at a sailing center and, in his free time, raced dinghies. He also played golf, at least until another kid hit him in the jaw with a club, causing a compound fracture. There’s a deep scar on his chin from that, one he liked to flaunt as a teen because he thought it made him look tough—though sometimes, he jokes, “if you catch me from the right angle, it looks like I have a crazy butt chin.”
He’s well rounded too, able to discourse knowledgeably on almost any topic, not just games and electronics. It’s a good thing, since a conversation with him is likely to veer in as many different directions as L.A. traffic, from modern music (“Why doesn’t anyone write power ballads anymore?”) to why the fashion industry deserves more respect in tech circles (“Many engineers don’t see fashion as cool because it’s so form over function, but the advances that make empires like Spanx are very much about function”).
And when it was time to start college, Luckey didn’t automatically pursue a degree in science or engineering. In 2009, when he was seventeen, Luckey enrolled at California State University, Long Beach, where he planned to major in journalism. “I wanted to be a tech journalist who understood how the technology worked,” he says. “I thought there was a place for someone who understood engineering.”
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When he had spare time between classes, Luckey kept working on his HMD prototypes. In the summer of 2011, his hobby helped him land a part-time job working with virtual reality pioneer Mark Bolas at his lab in the Institute for Creative Technologies at the University of Southern California. Bolas and his students had spent years refining hardware and software for VR headsets, and all their innovations were released on an open-source license. Working at the lab, Luckey absorbed both their wisdom and their technology, and quickly applied them to his own project.
Meanwhile, Luckey continued to post about his progress in the MTBS3D forums. On September 16, 2011, he announced a second headset, dubbed PR2; just over a week later he shared a list of improvements for PR3, an upgraded wireless version. At each step, his fellow enthusiasts offered encouragement and suggestions. In one thread, a forum member even offered to buy one of the prototypes. Luckey replied with an offer to lend him one for free, and demurred on the idea of starting a business. “If a lot of people are interested, maybe I could see about making more to sell (Maybe a kit?),” Luckey responded. “My goal is not really to make money, obviously, or I would not be telling everyone exactly how it works!”
But the conversation may have sparked something in the enterprising teenager. In April 2012, nineteen-year-old Palmer Luckey completed the sixth prototype of his home-brewed VR rig, and made a post on the MTBS3D forums requesting help with a plan to underwrite future development via a campaign on the crowdfunding website Kickstarter:
Hey guys,
I am making great progress on my HMD kit! All of the hardest stuff (Optics, display panels, and interface hardware) is done, right now I am working on how it actually fits together, and figuring out the best way to make a head mount. It is going to be be out of laser cut sheets of plastic that slide together and fasten with nuts and bolts. The display module is going to be detachable from the optics module, so you will be able to modify, replace, or upgrade your lenses in the future!
The goal is to start a Kickstarter project on June 1st that will end on July 1st, shipping afterwards as soon as possible. I won’t make a penny of profit off this project, the goal is to pay for the costs of parts, manufacturing, shippi
ng, and credit card/Kickstarter fees with about $10 left over for a celebratory pizza and beer. ;)
I need help, though!
I need something that illustrates the difference between low field of view HMDs and high FOV HMDs, probably some kind of graphic illustrating the difference in apparent screen size. Would probably want to compare the rap 1200VR, the HMZ-T1, and the ST1080. Maybe throw in a few professional HMDs like the SX111 for good measure.
Logo/s. I am listing the organization as “Oculus”, I plan on using that name on my VR projects from here on out. The HMD itself is tentatively titled “Rift”, if you have better ideas, let me know. I based it on the idea that the HMD creates a rift between the real world and the virtual world, though I have to admit that it is pretty silly. :lol:
Ideas for what I should show off in the Kickstarter video.
Ideas for Kickstarter rewards. The obvious one would be a full HMD kit, but I want to have some lesser monetary options for people who just want to show support. Laser cut badges? Some kind of software? On the other end, it seems like it would be a good idea to have some more expensive options that net you stuff like a wireless battery/video pack, or a motion tracker.
Anything else I am forgetting!
The help is appreciated! Really excited about this, I think it could be the kind of thing that jumpstarts a bigger VR community, and hopefully shows that there is a big demand for wide FOV, truly immersive displays.
The forum members rallied to the cause of the Oculus Rift, with offers of free design work, marketing help, and technical assistance. One commenter even urged Luckey to charge more and earn a profit: “It’s extraordinarily cool of you to keep this rock-bottom on the pricing tier but you absolutely deserve to make something from your efforts. This could be the start of something much bigger and you needn’t limit yourself unnecessarily.”
And at least one of the interested forum members was no ordinary hobbyist. John Carmack had made his first splash in the video game business in 1991, when he cofounded id Software; over the following decade, he cemented a legendary reputation working as lead programmer on seminal games including Doom, Quake, and Wolfenstein 3D. Earlier in the month, Carmack had posted on MTBS3D asking for help modifying a Sony head-mounted display, and Luckey had responded. “We had a public discussion on why it would be very difficult,” Luckey says. “There were other people like, ‘Oh, my God. It’s John Carmack.’ But I wanted to play it cool.”
A week after Luckey announced his Oculus Rift project, Carmack sent him a private message via the forum. “I think he had gone through and seen some of the threads I had posted about my work,” Luckey says. “He asked me if he could buy or borrow one of my prototypes so he could check it out. I told him he could just borrow it for free.” Luckey packed up a headset and shipped it to Carmack’s lab in Texas.
On May 17, 2012, Carmack posted a review of the Rift on the MTBS3D forums. “After dialing everything in, this is by far the most immersive HMD of the five I have,” he reported. “If Palmer comes close to his price target, it will also be the cheapest. I will be including full support for this in the next new PC title we release.”
An endorsement like that from John Carmack was more than enough to get the forum’s VR enthusiasts lining up to back Luckey’s Kickstarter. But Carmack wasn’t finished. The Rift prototype was great hardware but lacked decent software; the device ran a hodgepodge of programs originally intended for 3-D monitors and commercial projectors. So Carmack modified code he’d originally written for the 2004 first-person shooter Doom 3, allowing the video game to run on the headset. And then he brought the Rift to the Electronic Entertainment Expo in Los Angeles, one of the video game industry’s largest annual trade shows.
At the event, Carmack ran demos of Doom 3 on the headset for dozens of high-profile game designers, executives, and journalists. Each of them saw an action-packed, three-dimensional, truly immersive simulation—and walked away a believer. “I felt like I was literally standing in the game, with full 360-degree vision and interactivity,” a CNN reporter wrote about the experience. “The potential and payoff . . . was truly astounding.”
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To the layperson, the Oculus Rift might not look too different from the VR headsets they’d seen in science fiction movies. If anything, the prototype looked cheap and goofy—a block of plastic held together by silver duct tape, attached to a head strap borrowed from a pair of Oakley ski goggles. So what made it special?
Before the Rift, VR headsets were big and heavy, packed with custom screens and complicated optics. They had small fields of view, so wearing one felt like looking at the world through a porthole. The images they displayed had poor contrast and low resolution. And the picture was laggy—turn your head and it took a moment for the system to react, creating a disparity between motion and vision that inevitably led to nausea.
But when Palmer Luckey set to work on the Rift in his parents’ garage, he did so with limited resources and a hacker’s aesthetic—a desire to make it smart and simple, using widely available hardware, so that others could follow in his footsteps.
Inside that block of plastic, the Oculus Rift contained a 1280-by-800-pixel screen, split in two in order to show each eye a different 640-by-800-pixel image. Users looked at the screen through a pair of glass lenses. And on the outside, a motion-tracking sensor kept track of which way they were looking.
It was inexpensive. It used an LCD screen—a technology that, thanks to the mobile phone boom, was suddenly cheap and easily available, and displayed bright, high-contrast pictures.
It was responsive. Three decades of progress building microchips and software to power fast-paced video games meant that the system had enough speed to assure low latency, the time from when motion happens to when the view actually changes. That meant less lag and less nausea.
It was small and light. Other headsets bulged with complex systems of heavy optics, designed to magnify images and correct for visual distortion caused in the process. But the Rift used software to pre-distort the image, so it looked perfect after it passed through just two lightweight magnifying lenses.
And it had a wide field of view—perhaps its most important innovation. Before the Rift, the best consumer-level headset on the market had a 45-degree horizontal field of view, about half the range of human vision. Wearing it was like staring through a toilet paper tube. But the Rift’s field of view was a stunning 90 degrees horizontal, 110 degrees vertical. It filled the user’s entire field of vision, cutting them off from the real world and immersing them in the virtual.
“Palmer was solving a problem, not pitching a marketing group, so he did the job right instead of putting the least important things first,” says David Wiernicki, president of Force Dynamics, a Trumansburg, New York, company that builds motion simulators for applications, including driving games. “When you wear a Rift, everything else disappears. Every other display—especially current-generation head-mounted displays—has a frame. You can always see the edge; you always have a reference telling you where the game world ends. With the Rift, the game world doesn’t end, because you’re in it. People talk about 3-D—hell with the 3-D! What matters here, what makes the Rift a product that outperforms the most frantic hyperbole, is that it eliminates the display device. There’s no longer a perceptible display, and when you can’t tell that there’s a display, your brain says: You’re here. And so you’re there.”
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Word of Luckey’s big breakthrough spread quickly. Virtual reality was still something of a taboo subject in tech circles, and new products were generally met with extreme skepticism—everyone remembered how in the 1990s the technology was overhyped, then underdelivered. But John Carmack had credibility and wasn’t some shady marketer. The few people who were lucky enough to try his Doom 3 demo could confirm that he was onto something.
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As a result, a small number of investors and enthusiasts started courting Palmer Luckey for a chance to get involved with his project. One of them was Brendan Iribe, then chief product officer at game-streaming company Gaikai. Iribe had grown up playing video games, and at thirty-two was already an industry veteran: in 2004 he cofounded a company called Scaleform that made development tools for game companies, and in 2011 he’d sold it to multinational software giant Autodesk for $36 million.
“I got a phone call in June 2012 that I needed to meet this guy Palmer Luckey, he’s onto something awesome, it’s virtual reality and it’s finally gonna work,” Iribe says. “I thought, ‘Nah, VR’s never gonna work.’ I’m too busy, I’m sorry. Then I looked on the Internet and saw some interesting news coming out of E3, and I thought okay, might as well go . . . I wouldn’t want to be the guy that misses the thing that changed the world.”
Iribe made contact with Luckey and arranged to meet him for dinner at STK, an upscale steakhouse in Los Angeles. “In walks Palmer Luckey in an Atari T-shirt, shorts, and these awesome flip-flops,” he says. “My first thought is, ‘Wow, he’s a lot younger than I expected’ . . . and a slight concern over whether [the restaurant] would actually seat us.”
The restaurant was accommodating, and the group—which included Iribe’s friends and fellow Scaleform veterans Michael Antonov and Nate Mitchell—got to talking. “We had this incredible evening,” Iribe says, “just listening to Palmer talk about the future of VR, his headset collection, and his infectious vision for where this was all gonna go.”
Iribe was still skeptical, but Luckey had caught his attention. A few weeks later, on July 4, the group got together again at a Long Beach hotel for a demo. Luckey arrived carrying a plastic tub loaded with dangling wires, circuit boards, a computer, and the taped-together Rift prototype. He put it all together, turned it on, and handed Iribe the headset.
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