How Palmer Luckey Created Oculus Rift | Hacker News Reader

How Palmer Luckey Created Oculus Rift

smithsonianmag.com

42 pointsstaunch23 comments

Doesn't seem to mention the existing VR work at USC that he referenced. Or any of the existing work at all.

Researchers have been making VR goggles for decades. Give them at least a tiny bit of credit for figuring a few things out.

Competition and individuality is good, but this culture is so deep into narcissism and cult of personality. Quite a lot of exceptional work is being dismissed or ignored just because it isn't uber-popular. And there is an enormous amount of duplication of effort.

We need to do a better job of structuring things to emphasize not only freedom and diversity of ideas but also collaboration.

Palmer Luckey and John Carmack are doing for VR what Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak did for PCs. They launched a new industry, one that will be bigger than PCs ever were.

... and then surrendered it to Facebook. Which means they aren't really like Jobs or Woz, except in a technical capacity.

I have nothing against Facebook. But would you have respected Zuck as much if he'd sold Facebook to Yahoo?

Either way, Facebook controls the industry now, and there are few industries that have grown to their full potential under the stewardship of a company that acquired the primary creator. Take automobiles, for example. Ford started his own company. He didn't start his own company and then sell it. Automobiles would certainly have done well even if he had, since transportation is a fundamental technology, but VR goggles aren't. How long will their development be delayed because Oculus no longer feels the pressure of getting their company off the ground? People keep talking like "they now have the resources they need to make Oculus great," but if history is any indication, having excessive resources tends to produce excessive failure, not success. For example, companies that take huge investment rounds usually fail to deliver something of value to customers. Maybe Oculus is in the same position. After all, if they don't deliver something people want, then there's no downside anymore for Oculus. They've already been bought by Facebook. They could fail to do anything from this point forward and it would no longer matter to them (except emotionally).

Breathless hero worship is a little over the top, considering the outcome. Let's wait and see what actually happens.

Well put. Instagraham's new thing is spamming push notifications about things you don't care about to get you back on the app. And FB seems to have kept their hands off more than others since the brands continue on. It's impressive how much an acquisition changes the seller. In software you're either building a monopoly or you're treading water. Once you're bought the monopoly dream expires and the back stabbing begins.

> ... and then surrendered it to Facebook.

Woz and Jobs surrendered their company too. Woz became disillusioned and Jobs got fired. They still managed to do a lot of important work during that time, including creating the PC industry.

> Facebook controls the industry now...

Oculus may be the leading player, but they're just one company making products. Other companies can make products too.

> Automobiles would certainly have done well even if he had, since transportation is a fundamental technology, but VR goggles aren't.

There's nothing fundamental about cars. There were other means of transportation. But VR is just as inevitable as cars were. When people what they could have, they'll demand it, just like they did with cars.

> How long will their development be delayed because Oculus no longer feels the pressure of getting their company off the ground?

John Carmack's work ethic is famous. He doesn't screw around and everyone else has to keep up with him. None of these guys is motivated by money, which means they've got a good shot.

> Let's wait and see what actually happens.

The VR industry is on a rocket ship trajectory and these guys launched it by shipping real products. That's already happened. Of course it's true that the hard work and fun of VR has only begun.

I believe so too, but let's not get ahead of ourselves. They don't even have a consumer version yet.

I do think that there is a possibility here to push computer tools to their next evolutionary step, much like what the GUI did in its day, allowing entirely new classes of applications to emerge.

Oculus could enable new tools that we can barely imagine today, much like Final Cut or Photoshop would have been hard to imagine in 1970. Being able to visualize simulations and other visual explanations in a way that is so close to our real world is potentially a game changer for machine assisted work.

But they sold the company to a megacorp with a terribly uninteresting product, and a CEO who believes that "anyone over 30 is useless". So maybe this vision won't happen just yet, and instead we'll get social-gamified-"ready player one" VR bullcrap.

The damn thing hasn't even been released yet.

It was clear years ago that it was possible to make better VR headgear. There's been some progress since the 80's and 90's. The question is whether VR is worth the trouble. I'm still not seeing the killer app for this. Hardcore gamers? Virtual tourism? Implanting false memories in kids? (The VR group at Stanford has used their system to let kids experience swimming with dolphins. Asked about it a few months later, the kids believe they really did swim with dolphins.)

A big problem is that VR has the same problem as gaming - moving and shooting works great, but try to manipulate anything and it sucks. Early thinking about VR was that it might be easier and more intuitive to do design work in VR than on a 2D screen. Autodesk did some work on this. Design in VR is like drawing while wearing mittens. No good.

Notice that the Oculus Rift crowd totally ignores the input side. The first generation of VR was "gloves and goggles". Now it's just goggles.

This may be the biggest dud since 3D TV.

http://controlvr.com/

The Kickstarter video claims it's the first consumer VR glove with finger sensing. It's not. The Nintendo Power Glove, 25 years ago, has that honor.

   https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Power_Glove

The Power Glove was a relatively decent input device. But the game machines of 1989 had no hope of displaying a virtual world in which it was useful.

Now if the "Clang" game kickstarter, which was fully funded years ago at $500K and produced zero, had produced something, there would at least be a game for this thing.

   https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/260688528/clang

It's too bad the guy wasn't able to try Crescent Bay. I've tried it and the screen door effect he complains about is gone. It's way better than the improvement from DK1 to DK2.

Were there any demos that required you to read text? That always been the hard thing for me.

Yea, in one demo you were standing in a submarine and there were dials everywhere. In another demo you are top of a tall building and if you look all the way down you can see little cars below. Not perfectly clear, but no screen door effect which makes a huge difference.

As I understand it, it was basically Carmack that made it actually work.

Before his help, I'm not sure it was more than an interesting demo of technologies we'd seen before.

They must have had something unique, or Carmack would have probably created his own company instead of joining Oculus...

I don't know. Carmack doesn't strike me as the sort of person that would want to waste his time with all the extraneous details involved in starting a company. Seems that he prefers to have his own isolated fief where others can handle the sales side while he can focus purely on R&D where he excels. He probably did some calculation regarding the potential of the technology vs. the competence of the founders and decided it was an important enough problem that he would be happy working at for the next few years.

A shame this article doesn't mention Valve which is where the technology came from. In fact what the VC's were demoed was Valve's $75 million rig (which does indeed look very good!).

And when Oculus started a ton of Valve IP was handed over to them...

Do you care to elaborate a bit? This is a pretty extraordinary claim.

It's not much of a secret, at least around folks I've talked with in Seattle.

Here are the the first couple of links that showed up in my google search: http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2014-01-17-valve-has-no-vr... http://www.reddit.com/r/oculus/comments/2ewj4a/oculus_and_va...

FWIW I have had a demo Valve's R&D headset and it is amazing!

Sure you're not confused with Jeri Ellsworth's and Rick Johnson's castAR tech?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technical_Illusions#castAR

Thanks, but I am definitely not confusing the two.

No. Valve hired Jeri to build them a hardware group to work on 'the next thing'. That team split in the middle with Jeri doing AR and the rest doing VR. Valve didnt want AR and dropped Jeri and her team (just fired them one day without explanation). The only decent thing Valve did was let Jeri keep all the AR IP she build with her team.

I am surprised this was down voted, since (as I replied to a reply) this doesn't seem to be any sort of secret. In fact someone brought it up at a VR meet up I was at a couple of weeks ago and they certainly didn't mean it as any sort of criticism.

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