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Comment by gumby | Hacker News Reader

He's an enthusiast, so frankly I don't trust his opinion.

I don't intend to imply that he might lie or anything like that, simply that his criteria are not the mass market criteria. Worse, he could be scaling his opinion based on what he knows about the state of the technology and the difficultly of getting things right. An innocent, even kind view, but doesn't imply that someone like me might happily adopt it.

If you consider the "Crossing the Chasm" model, the early adopters are where you get a toehold, but the money is made on later users who have different, and even disjoint criteria.

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I don’t think calling Palmer a run-of-the-mill enthusiast does justice to his passion/obsession. Last I checked he had the largest HMD collection in the world. His passion (more than anduril) has been to bring VR/AR to the masses, and if he feels like the Apple headset is a step towards that then I’m inclined to accept his interpretation.

> He's an enthusiast, so frankly I don't trust his opinion.

To call Mr. Luckey, the founder of Oculus VR and designer of the Oculus Rift, "an enthusiast" seems a bit diminutive. Do you not think the Rift was designed with the mass market as its target?

"Enthusiast" undersells for sure, but is still a true statement.

The fate of all VR at large defines what his ultimate legacy will be. In this, I think "enthusiast" is perhaps a less apt choice than "promoter." What he is doing here is promoting VR.

It's probably pretty well deserved. But I remain skeptical VR could get even 25% stake of the computing market (that'd be great!), and Apple certainly seems to have less than zero mass market ambitions. The question remains of what software really works & makes sense here, & we barely have guesses it feels like. The product might be excellent, and Luckey is lucky to have such an excellent company with such cachet shooting so stratospherically high market. Of course he'll promote this. Hopefully we figure out the use cases, some day.

> "Enthusiast" undersells for sure, but is still a true statement.

It's like calling Steve Jobs "a computing enthusiast" — it's ridiculous by omission (unless Palmer's Wikipedia entry is wrong). Clearly he was designing for the mass market, and in his roles as creator and designer was a proxy for that market.

There's the notion of "What hat am I wearing". If you are a CTO or whatever but just want to talk tech with your people, put on the "tech enthusiast" hat & take off the "I run this shit" hat. The roles we assume are fluid & sometimes our most defining aspects are not the best descriptions of our current speaking role, especially if everyone already knows it's Steve Jobs/Palmer Luckey.

What hat do you think Palmer was wearing here?

Hats is an internal motivational thinking device. Publicly, he'll always be the founder of Oculus, and his comments filtered through that lense. For better or worse he doesn't get the luxury of taking that "hat" off so whatever hat he's thinks he's wearing, it's the founder of Oculus hat, with all the acclaim, but also baggage that brings along.

Other people always only being able to interpret your through a single lens is other people's weakness and greatly to their detriment. What real authority they're using is an active question we should, as audiences, be considering.

Having it be explicitly swappable in internal use is a huge benefit. But all external communication also implicitly has hats. Whether we are smart enough to perceive that or too blunted to see.

> What hat do you think Palmer was wearing here?

Product creator and designer, since I believe those are the lenses through which he views potential Oculus killers. What hat do you think he was wearing?

Fair enough!

"Promoter" is my sly but real take; he's promoting his own industry & legacy here. "Industry Insider Enthusiast" might be a nicer take, a fittingly general hat to toot from here.

> Do you not think the Rift was designed with the mass market as its target?

I mean, maybe it was, maybe it wasn't, who knows. It certainly didn't achieve that, though. VR remains the most enthusiast-y of enthusiast-y things, despite various efforts.

The rift might have been intended as a mass market device but it certainly wasn’t one in practice: it demonstrably didn’t have the features and use case(s) necessary to reach mass market acceptance.

> designer of the Oculus Rift

Cough Valve and Abrash. You presumably do know the famous “Oculus” demo that got Zuckerberg’s investment was given at Valve using all of Valve’s headset and software, right? All that IP just handed to Oculus.

Say what you like about the guy but at least base it on facts.

He was designing it on his own and did a good enough job to get Carmack interested and promoting it through forum interactions: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=NYa8kirsUfg

I'm not sure what this Valve demo refers to.

The Oculus was the Valve headset and software. Abrash took the patents and code with him when he left Oculus. This is not some secret.

I'd believe this if Luckey wasn't developing it publicly on MTBS forums.

I share this view. Not to any hate on Palmer, but enthusiasts often have a very different product perspective and the products he's led are demonstrations of this. Again, not in a negative way, they just failed to capture public attention due to the tradeoffs.

The fact that it's Apple is what makes me less cynical about the hype. If Apple, a company predominantly focused on mass public adoption, is able to get an enthusiast hyped about one of their products... maybe they hit a good balance.

I generally like Apple gear but don’t forget the time they staged a whole press event in order to announce…an iPod dock, and not even a great one.

Yup, my take as well. "Oh, look, person who dedicated his life to VR glasses likes VR glasses." Oculus was also going to be a revolution but it stayed a niche. May these folks who explore alternate tech be blessed, but so far I see zero great uses of this tech, aside from simulation for training medics, military, police officers and so on. But those uses require much better latency, resolution & so on and there are already companies serving those niches with devices decidedly more expensive than any consumer can afford.

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