The naysayers here are funny. There's a fundamental basis for the technology thats rooted in physics and a mathematical model describing how to attain perfect bragg compliance in lightfield displays that has been well documented. But I didn't come here to argue about whether such a thing could exist in the world or not.

Let's turn instead to more practical matters. The reason they needed a lot of money is because no one on earth manufactures displays with the specs required to manipulate light in such a way. This isn't taking some already existing LCOS micro-displays and shoving them into an enclosure with fish-eye lenses. Oculus doesn't make their own displays and didn't spend the last 10 years perfecting them; that tech already existed because it came from the projector industry as a direct result of trying to make smaller projectors. What these guys are trying to do is basically as hard or harder than setting up a state of the art semiconductor company, that just so happens to be making a chip with special optical properties at the same time. Manufacturing stuff takes boat loads of money, let alone stuff that is that small. How long and how much money did it take to go from CRT->LCD is the correct frame of reference. They basically have to engineer and design the factory in tandem with developing the product/prototype. Not an easy feat, or cheap.

They could partner with one of the existing fab companies but its not clear that would be any more efficient because most of those companies are setup in such a way that is highly customized based on whatever fab and process tech the company specializes in or adopted, and most that deal with precision optical stuff (displays) are based on ancient and rudimentary liquid crystal and polarizer tech that is optimized for smartphones or TVs -- nowhere near what's required here. It's useful to know that even Apple doesn't make or design their own displays (although they do heavily influence the technology), but they do design custom processors and such.

I know its hard for the average reader here to visualize that someone was given a billion dollars to make something, without ever having made such a thing before and not yet releasing a product. And it probably makes people here mad, when they are struggling to raise a modest amount of money for their own startup. However, generally people who have billions to invest on high risk super high tech ideas aren't as stupid as people here would have you believe.