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Comment by cptskippy | Hacker News Reader

The accusation that Palmer was incapable of creating the Rift without Carmack's help and that he had a barely functional prototype, if true, is pretty insulting to Carmack. Carmack is a smart guy and I every much doubt he'd have joined on at CTO if the prototype was as awful as ZeniMax says it was.

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I don't think it was the prototype itself that was barely functioning, it was the software side that wasn't great. I remember when Palmer first showed off the device, it seemed to track just fine. When they introduced actual content, though, it became disorienting really quickly.

I backed them on Kickstarter so I got to see the DevKit1, DK2, and the CV1. The difference between the early versions and the end versions really came down to the software that handled the tracking. Compensating for movement lag and predicting frames to ease the jerkiness are really what converted it from a prototype to a viable commercial product.

That being said, it makes me laugh a little to see that Valve and the HTC Vive managed to outpace Oculus. Oculus had so much momentum and marketing buzz and they really dropped the ball on that one. Who knows how much of that was due to the FB purchase, but it definitely is weird seeing them lose their huge advantage.

Personally I have no interest in Oculus and it's equal parts Facebook and the vendor lock-in BS.

Oh, don't get me wrong. I'm never buying an Oculus product again, I'm just saying that I completely understand the accusation that the Rift was nothing without Carmack.

"That being said, it makes me laugh a little to see that Valve and the HTC Vive managed to outpace Oculus."

It was the other way around. Valve had been working in VR for years before the first oculus prototype. Oculus contacted Steam and copied the tech they had. The Steam guys actually helped Luckey because it was the small guy doing the open source thing.

They did not take into account the selloff to facebook of all this information.

I don't know how much stock I put into this. If you're going based off of what Yates said in that Reddit interview, I'd take that with a grain of salt. Palmer was working on a 3D head mounted display back in 2010/2011 and Valve has only admitted to VR research since 2012/2013. That's not to say that they couldn't have worked on it before then, but Palmer wasn't involved at that point. He also was only working on a 3D headset and wasn't initially planning on a VR headset from what I understand.

On top of that, Oculus definitely had more marketing/media buzz so they were ahead of Valve in the consumer mind. The end product might be closer to Valve's than to his original prototype, but he definitely had a small head start on them for the prototype and a huge head start from a marketing perspective. Valve all but shattered that.

Here's Palmer's first announcement in like 2012: http://www.mtbs3d.com/phpBB/viewtopic.php?f=140&t=14777

This is simply not true. Valve had precisely ZERO VR research up until 2012. Thats when they finally decided to pursue hardware and hired Jeri Ellsworth to build hardware division.

Oculus was working pretty closely with Valve for a fair while there. Is there any chance that this will come back to bite Valve now that this precedent has been established? It would be easy to claim that Valve gained some of their VR know-how from their partnership with Oculus.

I don't think anyone is insulting Carmack. Quite the opposite, pretty much everyone knows that Carmack is an absolutely brilliant, world-class developer. You could easily make the argument that Carmack saw the prototype and was more excited by its potential than its present quality that drove him to sign on. Then, being Carmack, he alone had the technical chops to make it usable.

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