The question now, it seemed, was whether Palmer Luckey would be the new David Sarnoff—the executive who popularized television and led his company, RCA, to become one of the biggest on the planet—or Philo Farnsworth, the inventor of television, who did pioneering work but ended up largely forgotten. When I asked him the question directly, Luckey waved off the comparison. “Instead of ‘Hey, here’s this wonder kid who started this great company,’ I’d much rather see a hundred virtual reality companies selling a billion headsets,” he told me.
So far, if success had gone to Luckey’s head, he wasn’t showing it, and he still seemed to be a typically laid-back—if unusually geeky—California boy. He lived with seven friends (all but one of them Oculus employees) in a shared house in Silicon Valley he unironically called the Commune, where they spent hours playing massive multiplayer tournaments of video games like Super Smash Bros. His one concession to newfound wealth, a newly purchased Tesla Model S, shared driving time with a 1986 GMC conversion van with red shag carpet. “I figure you can buy a Tesla and not be too snooty,” he says, shrugging.
The Commune is located in the tony suburb of Atherton, California, just one neighborhood away from Facebook’s headquarters in Menlo Park, and Luckey was splitting his time between that office and Oculus’s headquarters in Irvine, an hour south of Los Angeles. Facebook had given its new acquisition a great deal of autonomy, mostly providing administrative support and financing, in order to leave Luckey and his team free to concentrate on perfecting the Rift headset. When he found himself in the Facebook office, he avoided boardrooms and meetings, preferring to sit with the engineers and tinker in the hardware workshops. “There’s a lot of people here who know all about Oculus but don’t know who I am,” he said.
Mostly, though, Luckey spent the fall of 2014 on the road. Ostensibly, he was doing research and recruiting engineers—“Actually managing people is a talent that I don’t really have, but I’m good at getting people to work with me,” he said—but he was also using his newfound fame to evangelize virtual reality. On October 16, he appeared at the National Portrait Gallery in Washington, DC, to receive an American Ingenuity Award from the Smithsonian Institution, and gave a speech to the glamorous gala crowd wearing jeans, sandals, and an Oculus T-shirt under a suit jacket.
At Forbes magazine’s first annual 30 Under 30 Summit, held in Philadelphia a few days later, Luckey appeared onstage with me to talk about VR, and was received like a rock star by the crowd of 1,500 twentysomething entrepreneurs. Between applause breaks he worked the audience like an old pro, cracking jokes and playacting kung fu moves. When I asked him about the complaints from Kickstarter backers who felt burnt by the Facebook acquisition, he pivoted to the stupidity of governmental overregulation, pointing out how the 2012 JOBS Act prevented start-ups from giving out equity to crowdfunding backers. “Fuck the man, right?” he concluded as the audience roared. Moments later, rather than exit the stage via the stairs, he jumped off the front of the five-foot platform like an excited kid.
Afterward, a steady stream of admirers stopped him to talk as he headed out of the convention center, passing by celebrities like the rapper Wiz Khalifa, and several asked to take selfies with him so they could brag about the meeting to their friends. Luckey was gracious with each, asking questions about their work and giving out his personal email so they could continue their conversations. One fan asked him about favorite video games, and Luckey invited the guy over to the Commune to play them. When he finally got out of the building, an admirer even followed us as we walked back to our hotel, peppering him with technical questions. Luckey paid close attention and answered as best as he could—until he was distracted by a sign in the window of a fast-food restaurant.
“McDonald’s Monopoly game is back!” he gushed. “I love McDonald’s. I’ve been fighting this war for years trying to convince people McDonald’s is good. It turns out that McDonald’s is actually one of the healthiest fast-food places out there. I’m not talking about their salad options, I’m talking about their actual burgers, they’re some of the healthiest you can get. It turns out that white bread and greasy meat and sauces are just high calorie. That’s just how it is. But the crazy thing is that normal burgers and fries have way more calories, way more fat than McDonald’s, and it’s because McDonald’s actually has reasonable portion sizes. If you go to any diner-type place for a burger, it’s so much worse for you than a typical McDonald’s meal. That’s why I get upset when people are like, ‘Fries and burgers are so unhealthy.’ That’s not McDonald’s fault, it’s your fault for wanting to eat food that is inherently unhealthy. McDonald’s beef is 100 percent beef with no fillers. The only additives are salt and pepper. It is not high-quality beef, it is lean beef, in little shitty patties, that’s grilled all the way through, well done. It’s not a great patty, but that doesn’t mean that it’s bad or not meat. There’s no fillers or vegetable proteins or other things. The whole pink slime thing never was a problem for McDonald’s, and even if it was, they haven’t used it since 2007.”
As Luckey paused to take a breath, his admirer interrupted to say he was going to try to find his way back to the convention center. Luckey apologized for not being able to solve all his technical problems, gave him his personal email address, and promised to answer any follow-up questions.
It’s highly unusual for an executive at a multibillion-dollar start-up to offer a stranger that kind of access, but the gesture wasn’t unusual for Luckey. Later, David Wiernicki, president of the motion simulator company Force Dynamics, told me that he’d had a similar experience working with Oculus. “It boggles my mind that [Luckey] was answering emails from some tiny company off in the middle of nowhere,” Wiernicki said. “And during the middle of it all, when I asked if there was anyone else I could bother with niggling technical questions instead of him, he replied that as far as he was concerned, his engineers’ time was far more valuable than his, and he preferred to take the time himself rather than putting the load on them. For a guy in his early twenties who’s been slingshot from a bedroom to a multibillion-dollar CEO in a few dozen months, that kind of perspective is impressive.”
On January 5, 2015, a story I wrote about Palmer Luckey was featured on the cover of Forbes. Aside from raising his profile even higher—no less than Jay-Z, Puff Daddy, and Bruno Mars have written songs about appearing on the cover of that magazine—it also revealed the extent to which Facebook had made him rich. After a close analysis, Forbes estimated that Luckey owned around 25 percent of Oculus VR when it was acquired, making the deal a half-billion-dollar score; just nine months later, his net worth had already appreciated closer to $600 million, thanks to Facebook’s soaring stock. As far as the wealth experts at the magazine could determine, no entrepreneur in history—not even Mark Zuckerberg—had ever made a fortune that big, that young.
* * *
—
Of course, it was worth remembering that other young entrepreneurs had been in Luckey’s position before—like Jaron Lanier after he founded VPL Research. “Recent events are weird for me in a way that the folks at Oculus couldn’t possibly know, in that so many of the designs, the headlines, the little intrigues, and the chatter are similar to what I experienced over thirty years ago,” Lanier told me when I was working on the Forbes story. “All I can say is that I wish Mr. Luckey all the success in the world.”
VPL filed for bankruptcy two years before Palmer Luckey was born, but he knew its history and knew the obstacles that faced the Oculus Rift. “VR has never had a successful consumer product,” Luckey said. “It has always failed, and there are many examples of companies that crashed and burned, taking hundreds of millions of dollars in investment with them.”
But he still believed success was inevitable. The time was right, the tech was ready, and Oculus VR was in the right place to deliver. “I don’t think there are any comparable products,” Luckey said. “We’ve got the best team in the virtual reali
ty industry, we’ve got a lot of the best people in the games industry, we’ve got big partnerships with hardware manufacturers and game developers. I think we’re on the path of making the world’s best virtual reality hardware . . . and I think the consumer product is going to be way ahead of anything anyone else can do for the next couple of years.”
At the rate Oculus was growing, by the time a competing product did catch up to the Rift, virtual reality may have already gone mainstream. But even if it didn’t, Palmer Luckey wasn’t likely to give up on his dream. “Five years from now, I don’t know if everyone’s going to have a headset,” he said. “But I’ll be doing this until it happens, or until I die.”
Chapter 6
TAKING HOLD
In the spring of 2015, my email in-box contained more fantastic ideas about virtual reality than a box full of old cyberpunk novels—dozens of messages every day from public relations firms trying to convince reporters to write about their new clients in the burgeoning VR business. There were pitches for new video game studios (“the company’s initial efforts will be focused on creating VR games that everyone can enjoy”), new services (“we provide individuals and organizations with affordable 360-degree video solutions”), and new content (“I’m reaching out to invite you to be among the first to engage with Mountain Dew’s brand-new virtual reality experience!”). It seemed like every day I’d receive a new “BREAKING NEWS!” alert from some PR flak announcing yet another Kickstarter campaign for a “REVOLUTIONARY!” and “GROUNDBREAKING!” new virtual reality headset—most of which seemed to be backed by fly-by-night companies touting products that would never and probably should never make it to market. One prototype VR helmet promised to deliver a “revolutionary multisensory” experience by blowing hot air onto the users’ face, squirting them with water mist, and exuding an assortment of bottled scents—an innovation meant to bring the senses of touch and smell into VR, but which I suspected would just leave its users with wet, stinky faces. (A Kickstarter campaign for the FEELREAL VR mask eventually went unfunded, with only eighty-six backers pledging less than half of the company’s $50,000 target.)
I read most of the emails once and deleted them, but a few pitches did catch my attention. One came from a PR firm savvy enough to know the real trick to attracting a reporter’s attention. After trading a few emails with a media relations specialist for the Patrón Spirits Company, I found myself in their Manhattan offices surrounded by samples of free liquor. In an effort to market their tequila as a premium handmade product, Patrón had outfitted a specialized drone with seven video cameras, flown the rig through its distillery in Jalisco, Mexico, and stitched the footage together to create a “360-degree video virtual reality experience.” After I put on a Rift headset and flew for three minutes through a hacienda full of workers cutting agave, roasting and fermenting the milled piñas, and labeling and boxing the finished tequila, I had to admit to the PR team that it was an incredibly effective commercial. I hadn’t just been fed a slogan about how the company’s booze was handmade, I actually witnessed the bespoke production process firsthand, so I knew it to be true.
“We’ve always joked if we could transport people to the hacienda, we would never have to spend money on another ad,” one of the company’s marketing executives told me. Patrón planned to show off the virtual tour at tasting events, he said, and to outfit members of its sales team with Gear VR headsets. “When they’re in formal meetings with the head of food and beverage for a large retailer, instead of pitching, ‘Hey! Patrón is quality made, blah, blah, blah,’ we can just show them our process. At some of our events we’re even playing with the idea of, what if we could have the smell of cooked agave in the room while you’re experiencing this?”
I said he might want to take a cue from a recently failed Kickstarter and simply squirt tequila in the user’s face as they watched the video, but the suggestion was politely dismissed as impractical.
Another unsolicited email pitch caught my attention because of the start-up’s A-list backers—which included Google Ventures, the billion-dollar investment arm of the worldwide technology giant—and also because it promised the kind of VR I’d dreamed of ever since I’d read William Gibson’s Neuromancer. “In AltspaceVR, you can create shared, social experiences with anybody around the world, doing anything on the Internet,” the email said. “Want to watch Netflix with your friend in China, go online shopping with your mom in Florida or play chess with a stranger in Israel? With AltspaceVR, you can, and it feels as if they’re right there next to you.” I didn’t have any friends living in China, my mom was in Virginia, and I was terrible at chess, but that still sounded great.
About a week later I met a small team from AltspaceVR at a luxury hotel in Manhattan. When I arrived, they had already taken over a corner of the lobby bar with a massive laptop, a tangle of wires, and a modified Oculus Rift development kit. After quick introductions, one of the company’s executives, Bruce Wooden, jumped straight to fitting the Rift on my head, followed by stereo headphones with a built-in microphone. Before I was completely cut off from the real world in this cocoon of plastic, he explained that I could reach out and use a mouse on the cocktail table to move around, and that the headset was outfitted with a sensor device made by a company called Leap Motion that could track the motion of my hands, “so I could just wave or point at stuff.” As he pulled the Rift down over my eyes, he offered the barest of instructions: “Hold on a second, and then Eric will be in there to tell you what’s going on.”
I was in the dark for a moment, and then I was standing on a balcony overlooking a Japanese rock garden. “Hey, Dave,” someone said off to my left. I turned toward the source of the sound and saw a tall white robot, its eyes glowing green in a featureless face, its body long and tapered and seeming to hover above the hardwood floor. “I’m Eric,” he said, waving a disembodied hand.
Eric Romo, CEO and founder of AltspaceVR, was in his office in Redwood City, California, and I was in a hotel bar in New York, New York, more than 2,500 miles away. But at that moment we were both also in a three-dimensional digital environment created for social interaction in virtual reality. Romo called it Altspace, but it might as well have been the Matrix or the Metaverse. Both of us were running software on Internet-connected computers that allowed us to meet in a digital space, something like a chat room or a multiplayer video game, but without the immersion-breaking presence of a monitor on a desk.
As Romo showed me around, his robot avatar seemed to come to life, his head nodding and moving as he talked, and I could follow his gaze and see where he was looking. His hands could point to different objects in the environment or simply gesture for emphasis as we conversed. Even though the simulated environment looked like a 3-D video game and the robot bodies were highly abstract, it felt like we were actually in the same room; through gaze and gesture, his digital avatar drew my attention, and the normal rules of social interaction kicked in. I kept eye contact, I nodded when he talked, and as a result, I felt a kind of human connection that’s never present in a text conversation or on the phone. At one point when I moved my own avatar inexpertly and found myself apparently inches from Eric’s face, I automatically jumped back and apologized to him; it felt like I was violating his personal space.
For about half an hour, Romo demonstrated some of Altspace’s different environments—a movie theater, a living room, a backyard with a fire pit, a corporate conference room. Altspace was designed to import web applications as 3-D objects, so he opened up web pages and video streams, and they appeared as giant TV screens floating in the virtual space. I could move toward a video and the volume would get louder, and then it would diminish as I moved farther away. The same thing happened when we entered a room full of other Altspace users, who were congregating in several small groups; I found I could move in and out of individual conversations, just as if I were attending a social gathering in the real world.
When the demo was
over and Eric thanked me for my time, I said, “It was nice meeting you,” and without thinking about it, reached out to shake his hand. His avatar did the same, and our virtual appendages briefly intersected in space. It seemed silly, but the gesture had come naturally. I felt as though I’d actually made a personal connection; the meeting felt real, even though I knew that it wasn’t. And when I removed the headset, I had the uncanny feeling of being displaced. One second I was having a chat in a garden with an interesting new friend, and then suddenly I was sitting in the corner of an upscale bar while confused Manhattanites gave me horrified looks over their champagne and blood orange liqueur cocktails.
Later that day I returned to my office and found an email from Altspace’s PR manager waiting in my inbox. “As a journalist I realize that family and friends may not always understand exactly what it is you do,” it read. “The next time this confusion comes up, please send them the attached pictures. I think they will clear everything up.”
The photos were of me sitting on a couch in the hotel lobby, wearing an Oculus Rift headset and large over-the-ear headphones, seemingly cut off from the world. My head is turned away from the camera, and I’m gazing at something that is not there. I am oblivious to the fact that Bruce has moved to sit next to me on the couch and, with a huge grin, is reaching around me and holding up two fingers behind my head.
That was the day I learned the hidden cost of immersive virtual reality—the constant threat of bunny ears.
* * *
—
As start-ups like AltspaceVR scrambled to produce virtual reality applications and content, some of the world’s biggest tech companies were jockeying to beat the Rift to market and establish a hardware standard.
Defying Reality Page 10