Oculus Rift's Palmer Luckey: 'I brought virtual reality back from the dead'

Luckey has the look of a teenage gamer who hasnt ventured outside in a while. He has a mop of dark brown hair that looks as if it has never been professionally cut and a rather pale complexion. He is dressed in a work uniform only really permissible if your office is in California, you are considered a genius and are worth several billion dollars: a crumpled Hawaiian shirt, khaki board shorts and leather flip-flops.

I had read that he never wears shoes and ask him why. We invented shoes to protect our feet from the harsh environment, he says, but I live in modern-day California. Its pretty safe here. Nothings going to happen if I take them off. Also, it puts you in better touch with the world. You know what the world is like under your feet. He is sipping on coconut water, a drink he says he hates. Try it though; this one doesnt taste like crap, he says as he hands me the bottle. And its good for you.

Palmer Luckey was born on September 19 1992. He had an unexceptional childhood in Long Beach. The eldest of four siblings, he was homeschooled by his mother, Julie, and his father, Donald, who was a travelling car salesman. He spent much of his childhood inside, building PCs and crafting mutated video-game consoles from Nintendo GameCube parts. While his siblings were outside playing, Luckey made pocket money repairing and selling iPhones. He remembers the feeling of being different to his siblings. My parents knew it too, he says. But they encouraged me; they were just like, Dont shoot your eyes out, kid.

He was a voracious reader, obsessed with the science fiction of Neal Stephenson and Anne McCaffrey, and mid-1990s Japanese anime. But it was after watching the 1999 film The Matrix in which the computer programmer Neo learns the truth about his simulated reality before organising a rebellion against the machines that put him there that the seed for Oculus Rift was planted. Luckey wanted to make The Matrix a reality. Or at least a virtual reality.

An attendee at last Junes E3 gaming conference, in Los Angeles, tries out

the Oculus Rift. PHOTO: Getty Images

With his iPhone-repairs income, he bought half a dozen cut-price 3D monitors and head-mounted displays from government auctions. At the age of 15 he put these parts together to create his first headset. It wasnt very good, he says. It wasnt at all a true virtual-reality experience. He redoubled his efforts, committed to overcoming the flaw that had historically torpedoed virtual-reality developers: engineers could not smooth the head-tracking latency in the googles, which induced an unbearable, nauseating lag every time users turned their head. Luckey cracked it in months. He combined stereoscopic 3D, 360-degree visuals to widen the field of view with embedding more sensitive sensors in the monitor to ensure the image moved seamlessly with the wearers head. He had come up with a way of hacking the visual cortex, tricking it into believing the created world was a reality. The result was the first truly immersive experience.

When Luckey posted prototype pictures of the headset on the gamers message board Meant to Be Seen, he explained the thinking behind its name. I based it on the idea that the HMD [head-mounted display] creates a rift between the real world and the virtual world, he wrote on the forum, though I have to admit that it is pretty silly. 🙂

John Carmack a hero of Luckeys and the founder of id Software, which created the concept of 3D gaming began championing the Rift. In 2012 he demonstrated a prototype for a group of select journalists at E3, the gaming industrys flagship conference. Within days Luckey had dropped out of university and founded Oculus VR with another precocious dropout, his friend Brendan Iribe. The pair immediately took to the online crowdfunding site Kickstarter, aiming to raise $250,000 for prototype development costs and to produce a few hundred units for sale at $300. More than 9,500 people committed a total of $2.4 million. Andreessen Horowitz then led a round of angel funding that generated $75 million.

In March 2014 Mark Zuckerberg visited Oculus VRs offices in Irvine, California. Luckey was not keen on selling the company, but within weeks he had agreed to Zuckerbergs offer of more than $2 billion for a product in an industry that had been dormant for decades. It was already dead, Luckey says. Im not sure whether I he stops, before saying more resolutely, No, I did, I saved it from dying, brought it back from the dead. But it wasnt that I was the best at what I was doing; I was just one of the only ones that persevered. Nobody had actually managed to pull this off. Then, bam.

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Oculus Rift's Palmer Luckey: 'I brought virtual reality back from the dead'