* * *
—
The Vive put Oculus on notice. The Rift’s high-profile Kickstarter campaign had won the company lots of news coverage, and Palmer Luckey’s kid-genius act kept buzz going through the long months when Oculus had nothing new to show. But now an established global consumer electronics company had teamed up with one of the brightest stars in the game business and stolen the spotlight. Tech reporters covering GDC called the new demo “spectacular” and “the best ever made,” and software developers—the content creators critical to the success of any new computing platform—were lining up to get their hands on a kit. Even worse for Oculus, HTC seemed ready to deliver right away. When CEO Peter Chou announced the product, he promised that a developer version of the Vive would be available within a few months, and that the company would actually ship a final consumer version by the end of 2015.
In contrast, Oculus had already produced two development kits, but refused to say how many more prototypes it had planned or when it might actually release a consumer product. No one thought the Rift would hit the shelves in 2015. It increasingly looked like the “first practical VR headset” wouldn’t actually be the first to market.
In fact, it might not even be the second. Sony was also putting the heat on at GDC. On the same day I had my Vive demo, I attended a press conference where Shuhei Yoshida, president of Worldwide Studios at Sony Computer Entertainment, announced that the Project Morpheus virtual reality headset would launch in the first half of 2016. The company even had a few prototype units on hand for attendees to try out, and while the demos—most notably, a virtual trip to the deep sea in a shark cage, which concluded with a disturbingly realistic great white attack—didn’t impress me as much as what I’d seen on the Vive or the Rift, I was very impressed that the demo was running on a $399 PlayStation 4 video game console, instead of a high-end gaming PC that probably cost several thousand dollars. While Oculus and HTC fought over the relatively small market of high-end PC gaming enthusiasts, Sony planned to go mainstream and sell a slightly less powerful headset that ran on a device 5.6 million gamers around the world already had in their homes.
In the two and a half years since virtual reality had reentered the public consciousness, Oculus VR had seemed to be the clear leader—maybe even the only serious competitor—in the race to finally deliver a consumer-ready VR product. But in the days after GDC, it seemed like the company was being eclipsed. Many of the developers I spoke to at the show said they were more comfortable working with a company like Valve than with Facebook. Others figured they’d make more money designing VR games for the ubiquitous PlayStation console than they would for a select few enthusiasts who owned cutting-edge gaming PCs.
Oculus attempted to calm some of those fears on May 6, when it revealed new details about the first consumer version of the Rift, dubbed CV1, in a series of blog posts on the company’s website. First, the company promised, it would start taking preorders for the headset later in 2015, and would actually ship the device sometime in the first quarter of 2016. Second, the company released some of the technical specifications of the device, in an attempt to prove that a brand-new computer capable of running a Rift could be purchased for as little as $800—twice as much as a PS4, but far less than the several thousand dollars I’d imagined.
Just over a month later, on June 11, 2015, Oculus VR officially unveiled the final consumer version of the Oculus Rift at a small press event in San Francisco. Brendan Iribe kicked off the event by showing off the final form of the headset, a slim fabric-covered device that included two high-definition OLED screens, built-in headphones, and a single external tracking sensor.
“We’re able to finally deliver on the dream of virtual reality,” Iribe said. “This is going to change everything . . . We’ve all been dreaming about this for decades, and it’s finally here.”
Iribe didn’t say how much Oculus would charge for that dream or when, exactly, it would ship the product. But the press event did give him a chance to show off a slick-looking headset and quell some of the fears that the Rift had fallen behind in the market. And after Iribe debuted the hardware, Palmer Luckey took the stage for a surprise announcement—Oculus Touch, a pair of handheld controllers that tracked a user’s hand movements, just like the Vive’s SteamVR controllers.
After the event was over, Luckey remained on the stage and put on the Rift headset. Print and video news photographers swarmed onstage as the twenty-two-year-old whiz kid looked toward the sky, as if gazing at virtual objects that only he could see inside the (unplugged) gadget. Then he raised his hands, showing off the Touch controllers, and pretended to be boxing a virtual opponent. The crowd surrounded him, squeezing together as tight as the front rows of a rock concert, taking pictures and shouting questions.
Two months later, Palmer Luckey appeared on the cover of Time magazine in almost the same pose, wearing the Rift headset, alongside the text: “The Surprising Joy of Virtual Reality . . . And Why It’s About to Change the World.”
* * *
—
A few months later, at Oculus’s annual developers conference in Hollywood, I interviewed Luckey for the first time since the CV1 was announced. When I entered he room, he bounded over, shook my hand, and then just as quickly retreated and threw himself prone onto a couch.
“Busy day, huh?” I asked. “How’s it going?”
“I’m really running on fumes,” he said.
Hearing this, an Oculus PR representative who was working the meeting stepped forward. “Palmer, what can I get you, man?”
“You cannot help with what ails me,” Luckey said, sitting up. “I am exhausted in body and mind.”
“Aside from preparing for this conference, what have you been working on?” I asked.
“Touch has been the biggest project. I’m actually focused on a lot of things— No, that’s kind of oxymoronic . . . I’m distracted by a lot of things. Back in the early days when it was just me, I had to work on everything, and now I don’t have to, we have smart people working on everything. So what I do is get distracted and try to work on everything, because I care about everything that’s going on.”
“Are you still doing any hands-on engineering? Did you do any on the Touch controllers?”
“Oh, definitely. I’m doing top-level stuff too, and I do a bunch of PR stuff like we’re doing right now, where I trick people into repeating things that I say. What a great trick. It’s like you talk to them and then they go out and they’re like, ‘Hey, here’s what Palmer said.’ How often does that happen in real life? But other than that, I still do real work. I think of myself as a hardware guy. I’m really passionate about making our hardware better.”
“Is there a particular engineering problem that’s really engaged you over the last year?”
“The ergonomics around Touch were a big challenge, making a controller that worked well for everyone and still felt natural. When you’re making a tool, like a screwdriver, you can make compromises. It might be a little too big for one guy, a little too small for another guy, but that’s fine as long as it works, because you only use a screwdriver for a couple minutes. But with Touch, you might use it for hours and hours, and it has to work for me with my gigantic hands, all the way down to somebody with little bitty hands. I think it’s been one of the most difficult ergonomic challenges ever, because you have to make something that works for everybody, and you want them to feel like it’s actually their real hand. That’s pretty rough.”
“It’s not about fit,” I said. “It needs to feel like an extension of you.”
“Yes, but even beyond that,” he replied, “because an extension might mean holding a tool. You want it to feel like you’re not holding anything at all, that you just have hands in the virtual world.”
“So is the Touch design locked down now? Are both Rift and Touch ready to manufacture?”
“Well, there’s a b
ig difference between having a design that’s locked and a design that is actually coming off of a manufacturing line. You have to actually manufacture this thing with real processes, real machinery, real automation—see what the issues are, make tiny little adjustments. And like, when I’m talking about tiny, I don’t mean like trimming a few millimeters here and there . . . and then getting all of the notches and the levers and the straps and everything feeling like they’re really dialed in. There’s a lot of work going from a one-off prototype to something where we’re cranking out thousands of them every day.”
“And you’ve had to invent so much of the manufacturing process, right? It’s all custom manufacturing, not something you can simply hire a partner to build.”
“I’m glad you recognize that, and I can’t tell you too much about it, but some of the fixtures we have on our assembly line may be literally the most complex automated manufacturing steps for any consumer product in history. There are more complex [processes] for certain scientific instruments that we’re aware of, but for a consumer good, these might literally be the most complex, ever.”
“So you’re doing a lot of fine-tuning and polishing at this point?” I asked.
“Yeah . . . and over the last few months, I’ve personally been . . . I won’t say ‘wasting,’ but I’ve been spending a lot of time on media.”
I laughed. “So I’m not wasting your time, but this isn’t your favorite part of the job.”
“It definitely isn’t a waste,” Luckey said. “It’s very valuable, especially when it comes to VR . . . It is super important [to explain] something that hasn’t really come into the consumer consciousness. But at the same time, you’re right, it’s not my most favorite thing to do.”
“How are you handling the attention? The cover of Forbes, the cover of Time. How do you feel about that?”
“This sounds super douchey, so just bear with me. There are a bazillion guys in business who get this kind of attention. Sometimes it’s just their fifteen seconds of fame . . . But what’s actually going to make me successful isn’t being on a cover as face of the month, it’s getting the Rift on there, so people say, ‘What is that thing? Why is it special?’”
I sat up in my chair. “You know, I was having lunch recently with my eighty-something-year-old uncle who was visiting New York. I don’t see him much. He asked me what I’ve been working on, and when I told him I was writing a lot about virtual reality, he asked, ‘Is that what that kid was doing on the cover of Time?’”
“Exactly,” Luckey said. “The people who are looking at the covers of magazines or looking at newspapers, they are probably not aware of virtual reality. So making them aware of it is the first step.”
“Do you get recognized on the street?” I asked.
“Very rarely. It’s because I am a master of disguise,” he said, laughing. “I guess my appearance changes somewhat regularly. Like, do you see my hair, how it’s cut? I look super, super fresh. I don’t look like a hippie. I get recognized at game conventions and tech conferences. But on the street, it’s pretty rare.”
“Have you gotten advice from Zuckerberg or anybody else in the industry about what’s gonna happen?”
“I don’t think it’s gonna happen to me like it’s happened with Zuck,” Luckey said. “Zuck is truly the face of Facebook. Right now I’m that for Oculus, but I think that in a year there’s gonna be way more people who know about the Rift than about Palmer Luckey. That number’s gonna be vanishingly small.”
“So you’re the story that gets people talking about the Rift, and once the product is out, you fade to the background?”
“I hope that VR is a way bigger story than whatever I’m doing, because my story hasn’t changed over the last few years. I’ll admit it’s a pretty good story. It’s like one of those stereotypical ‘he came from nothing and look where he is now’ stories. But you can only tell it so many times, and then there’s plenty of other examples of new people doing good things. It’s only interesting for so long.”
* * *
—
Maybe Palmer Luckey’s star would eventually fade, but in the last few months of 2015, VR was getting hotter and hotter. In October, toy industry giant Mattel relaunched its View-Master stereoscope as the View-Master Virtual Reality Viewer, repositioning the seventy-six-year-old novelty as a high-tech gadget. The new viewer, designed in partnership with Google and based on its Cardboard technology, was a $30 plastic case that fit around a smartphone; if users ran a View-Master app and peered through the headset, they could view 360-degree 3-D environments including the Australian Outback, the Tower of London, or the surface of the moon. Additional sights were available for purchase both via download and on $15 “experience reels” reminiscent of the classic View-Master cardboard photo disks.
And virtual reality wasn’t just a hot product. It had a certain high-tech cachet that made it a must-have accoutrement to any cool event, premiere, or party. In just one twenty-four-hour period in mid-October 2015, you could go from Fifth Avenue in Manhattan (where apparel company Tommy Hilfiger set up Gear VR units so shoppers could watch its fall runway show from a virtual front-row seat, before buying) to Wall Street (where a black-tie crowd that included model Karlie Kloss and singer-songwriter Usher walked the red carpet into a luxurious charity gala, and then fit headsets over their perfectly coiffed hairdos to take a virtual tour of a run-down schoolhouse in Toklokpo, Ghana) to just off Times Square (where attendees at the premiere of the horror film Paranormal Activity: The Ghost Dimension could demo a new VR game based on the film franchise).
VR was also booming in the news business, where executives who’d been blindsided by the rise of the Internet seemed determined to get ahead of the next big digital medium. In early November, The New York Times distributed more than one million Google Cardboard viewers to its subscribers, bundling the kits in with their weekend newspapers, and released a free smartphone app that allowed users to watch 3-D documentary films and try out interactive features like a virtual tour of New York City.
At a launch party for the app in Manhattan on November 5, members of the media mingled and sipped cocktails while executives gave speeches about the profound impact VR would have on journalism. “The New York Times has been telling stories for a hundred and sixty-four years, and this feels like one of those rare moments where the way we tell stories has changed,” said Mark Thompson, president and CEO of the New York Times Company. “[It’s] about how you try and use every available means to bring the world to people in a more engrossing, more compelling way than before. It’s incredibly exciting for us.”
The first story available on the app, a documentary titled The Displaced, focused on three children uprooted by war and caught in a global refugee crisis. “It’s a story we report about all the time . . . but it’s also a story that is sometimes difficult for readers to understand and connect with,” said New York Times Magazine editor in chief Jake Silverstein. By using VR, the Times could actually put readers into a war zone, and allow them to see and hear from the victims of war firsthand, building a personal connection to the story.
“There are now sixty million people worldwide who have been displaced by war and persecution, and that’s more than at any time since World War II,” Silverstein said. “It was very important for our initial efforts . . . to be used to tell a story that we all know is important, that we all know is serious, and that we all want to understand much better.
“So I’m afraid I have to ask you to put your drinks down,” he said.
At that, the attendees reached for Cardboard viewers that had been issued to them upon entering the party, each preloaded with an iPhone running the New York Times VR app. After a short period of confusion where a handful of ink-stained old newshounds demanded assistance turning on the gadget, the crowd went still and silent—deaf to the world with headphones in their ears, blind to reality because of the boxes in front of
their faces.
Instead of joining them, I kept my viewer in my lap and observed the party guests as they watched the ten-minute video. Their heads turned in apparently random directions, sometimes seeming to stare at a wall or the ceiling, sometimes tracking the motion of objects that weren’t really there but must have seemed real to them. A few people’s mouths fell open in surprise. Others frowned and looked distressed about what they were watching. It reminded me of the famous photograph from Life magazine of the audience at the 1952 premiere of a 3-D movie—a room full of elegant people wearing strange headwear, all lost in a shared illusion. Megaloptic creatures more startling than anything on the screen.
Chapter 7
VR AND CODING IN LAS VEGAS
We were somewhere around Utah on the edge of the troposphere when the embarrassment began to take hold. I remember thinking something like “I feel stupid wearing this in public; maybe I should take it off.” And suddenly there were clowns all around me and the sky was full of shirtless gymnasts wearing sequined pants, swinging and spinning on nylon straps, even though I was in a jet going about four hundred miles an hour to Las Vegas. And an orchestra was playing and a woman was singing something that sounded like French.
Then it was quiet again. I had removed the VR headset and popped out my earphones when I noticed the guy in the window seat looking at me. “What is that?” he asked, gesturing at the brick of black-and-white plastic in my lap. “It’s a virtual reality headset,” I said. “I was watching a video.” I yanked my phone out of the device and shoved everything into my carry-on bag. No point in mentioning the Cirque du Soleil show, I thought. The poor bastard will be in Vegas soon enough.
It was January 2016, and the consumer version of the Samsung Gear VR had been out for two months. Most stores were still sold out. Very soon, I knew, wearing a headset in public might be completely normal behavior. But today it was still strange and made me self-conscious. I would have to ride it out. The annual Consumer Electronics Show was about to get started, and when I got there I’d be trying dozens of new virtual reality products. More than 170,000 people from around the world were expected to attend the tech expo, filling the convention center to capacity and spilling over into hotel ballrooms down the Vegas Strip . . . and I was, after all, a professional journalist; so I had an obligation to cover the story, geeky or not.
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