8 ms·

I got big into VR partly because of him, enamored by an interview of him my girl friend pointed me to in 2013. He was young, enthusiastic, idealistic, relatable

I got big into VR partly because of him, enamored by an interview of him my girl friend pointed me to in 2013. He was young, enthusiastic, idealistic, relatable to me. Well, as the years wear on he, and oculus itself, has established more of itself from the hacker/open source vision. They’ve made enemies along the way, and many of the reasons people hate him/Oculus I disagree with. It’s an infant field, they need to fund games to even having reasonable games. Making games have become increasingly expensive. Sure there’s a place for indie devs, but those games don’t draw the mainstreamers VR needs to take off like I, and many others need. That being said, the things I’ve heard and seen from him make me think he does emobdy the gamergate “tech bro” (and I do use that as a pejorative) make my stomach churn. That I can’t really forgive, and don’t want to support. The privacy aspects of a Facebook (or google for that matter) owning VR, and getting access to what we physically look at for advertising, is such a gold mine. Totally terrifying. That’s one reason my next system will likely be something like the Vive, inspite of me finding Oculus far more polished and fun to have. EDIT: Interestingly enough I asked him specifically on an AMA if he planned on staying at Oculus, his answer was an emphatic yes: https://www.reddit.com/r/pcmasterrace/comments/40ea0x/i_am_palmer_luckey_founder_of_oculus_and_designer/cytnax2/?context=3 https://www.reddit.com/r/pcmasterrace/comments/40ea0x/i_am_p...

dsaw 10y ago
Can you elaborate on why/how did you find Oculus more polished? Note : I have a Vive, which I bought after researching both (so I might be biased)
- baby 10y ago
  Yup, for having tried both, the Vive is far superior to the Oculus.
- marricks 10y ago
  I am certainly biased, despite having huge issues with Oculus. My experience is Vive demos and second hand. Setup was just placing cameras on a desk. I don't need external headphones. Store is curated, which is good and bad. I like trusting games won't give me nausea, or turn off people to VR. In my experience all it takes is one experience for some people to continue repeating "VR causes nausea" for literally 1+ year. My boss is this person, and it's hard to get him to try rift again. Touch, and seeing my fingers closely mirrored in VR, I find extremely polished and wonderful. Grabbing the first object in VR made me laugh in excitement, first time I did that since seeing Tuscany in CV1.
- conception 10y ago
  From most reviews the Oculus is very plug and play whereas the Vive takes a couple of hours to get all setup and calibrated correctly.
  - dahdum 10y ago
    Oculus doesn't have room scale, and just got touch recently. It's easier to setup something with half the functionality.
    - TwoBit 10y ago
      Oculus certainly has some room scale. I use it fine in my 12x12 room. It's otherwise better than the Vive in a lot of ways. Asw, atw, screen door, audio, comfort, clarity across the fov, controllers, apps. The bigger room scale is about the only thing the Vive does better.
      - dahdum 10y ago
        Oculus needs 3 tracking devices for room scale, and is still smaller and buggier. Games are required to be designed for 180 degrees instead of 360 like the vive. Vive is also getting wireless headset support this quarter (TPcast). Oculus poured far too much money into paying off developers for exclusive titles than trying to compete on technology, and as far as I can tell are falling further behind.
        TwoBit 10y ago
        I've read that the wireless options are coming tonRift as well. Why wouldn't they? Oculus just doesn't talk as much publicly. 360 tracking works for me with three sensors. The Rift is less expensive than Vive now too. It seems like you are cherry picking your facts, which indicates you have technology religion. So no point discussing with you.
        dahdum 10y ago
        I have both....you cherry picked yours too. There is a large difference in experience, and I'm just endlessly annoyed Rift hasn't delivered on their promises, and buy exclusives vs develop tech. I'd say I'm a fair weather fan of either tbh. I'm sure I came across as more argumentative than I meant to be.
- dkonofalski 10y ago
  I'm not the OP, but I have both the Oculus and the Vive and, to me, the Vive is a much better experience. For me, the big issue is that, while the Rift is a bit easier to set up (but not by much), the tracking is just not good enough to get that immersive experience. As soon as you lose tracking once, it throws the whole thing out the window. The Vive's tracking is pretty flawless. The Rift, on the other hand, is finicky and, if you even attempt the room scale setup with touch, you'll feel like someone trying to mess with an analog TV antenna. With the Rift, I'm initially impressed with it (resolution is better, headset is lighter, etc) but then constantly reminded that this is new tech. With the Vive, it's clunkier and more pixelated (not by much) but I forget completely about all of it when I'm deeply immersed in a game.
  - ehsanu1 10y ago
    You've got room scale setup with 3 cameras? Note that there were huge problems with the software a couple of releases ago that were recently resolved. Tracking is really smooth and solid right now for me personally on Oculus.
  - sleepybrett 10y ago
    Tracking might be "resolved" but man three usb3 cameras + the usb3 for the headset, is a hard sell on a lot of systems. Most people who are successfully running 3+ camera roomscale deployments have at least one if not two extra usb3 cards in their machine. They just made a big mistake going with camera tracking, the lighthouse solution just seems much more scalable.
    - meheleventyone 10y ago
      I actually think the opposite. Camera based tracking is the future and the Lighthouse stuff whilst good right now is going to something of a dead end. In the future we're going to be using inside-out tracked headsets which will be highly reliant on camera tech. Even more so for a workable general use AR glasses solution. So perhaps more fiddly to setup now hurting consumer adoption but better in the long term?
- meheleventyone 10y ago
  Not the OP either but I use both extensively at work and haven't paid my own money so subject to less bias in that sense. I've also had a fair run at everything from Cardboard to the Hololens over the last couple of years. Once setup I find the tracking similar. The main advantage of the Vive is the ability to track a larger space. Outside of arcades this is a bit of a non-issue currently as most users don't have that much space. A lot of users also don't tend to walk around that much or at least more tentatively due to the tether. The Touch controllers are much better ergonomically and offer more input options. But they are also less non-gamer friendly. The Vive wand suffers from being enormous with badly placed buttons. Headset wise the Rift is a clear winner right now. It's lighter, has a much better harness and the integrated headphones remove a lot of the faff factor putting it on. Vive is releasing kits that address some of this later in the year. Store wise Oculus does a better job of surfacing products that will meet consumer expectations. Mostly because there are less hobby projects clogging it up and the exclusive content so far has been good. Then you can still head over to Steam, itch and others to explore more questionable variety.
mikewhy 10y ago
> Interestingly enough I asked him specifically on an AMA if he planned on staying at Oculus, his answer was an emphatic yes A year ago he said "I don't have plans to do anything else, so no real lamentations!", that seems like less than emphatic yes to me.
cr0sh 10y ago
VR is anything but an "infant" field. Maybe today's incarnation, maybe amongst consumers. But the idea of "gloves and goggles" goes back a long way - with its first real implementation happening by Ivan Sutherland ("Sword of Damocles" and the lesser known "Twinkle Box" for tracking in the late 1960s), then later work done in the 1980s and 90s by NASA, VPL Research, and Jarod Lanier, among others (which started the first VR wave). If you have an interest in VR now, and you haven't already, you owe it to yourself to check out the history of this fascinating, if still nascent and buggy, field.
- yrro 10y ago
  Horizon: Colonizing Cyberspace is an informative (and nostalgic!) overview of the field in the early 90s. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VuZonQVN4uw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VuZonQVN4uw
- mrbill 10y ago
  My high school senior English class research paper was on VR ... in 1993. Lanier featured heavily as he was one of the "public faces" of the technology back then, with all of the high-dollar stuff coming out of JPL. I remember buying a Nintendo Powerglove in college and hooking it up to the parallel printer port on a '486 just so we could use it to move around a couch in a virtual room on the screen (in REND386 if I'm remembering things correctly; it's been 21 years). Anybody else remember the Amiga-based "Dactyl Nightmare" game where you stood in a pod with a goggles helmet on? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v6t69mp0ZhE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v6t69mp0ZhE
pillowkusis 10y ago
>He was young (still is) enthusiastic, idealistic, relatable to me. I would not describe him as idealistic or relatable. He's a self-identified Trump supporter/donator[0] and definitely has some alt-right leanings. Regardless of your politics, I think it's fair to say that someone with his political leanings is not considered "relatable" by a decent portion of Americans. [0]: http://www.theverge.com/2016/9/23/13025422/palmer-luckey-oculus-founder-funding-donald-trump-trolls http://www.theverge.com/2016/9/23/13025422/palmer-luckey-ocu...
- marricks 10y ago
  I completely agree. My meaning was he seemed like that to me in 2013, and many others for that matter. Also he is still young.
- drawnwren 10y ago
  It's very odd in 2017 that so many people are being socially disqualified because their political ideology doesn't align with San Francisco's.
  - agreedasdfs4 10y ago
    Oh come on, that's overly-simplified. Aligning with Trump is aligning with some pretty dreadful behaviors and attitudes about people that aren't: 1) Rich 2) White 3) American
  - pcwalton 10y ago
    Fortunately, that's not what's happening.
    - ta0684 10y ago
      It is on Hacker News.
  - EpicEng 10y ago
    Eh, with Trump I have to disagree. He has shown time and time again that he is a petty, egotistical sicophant with little regard for humanity in general. He's a documented liar and swindler. I have a hard time giving his supporters the benefit of the doubt and I am certain ly no San Francisco liberal.
kirrent 10y ago
I got a Rift over a Vive partially because I knew him, or at least knew of him, on the benheck forums back when we were all kids trying to make our own portable consoles. I was always impressed by his work ethic and designs. Enthusiastic, idealistic, and relatable were perfect ways to describe him back then as well.
- girvo 10y ago
  I miss those forums. My portable GameCube never got finished
engx 10y ago
I don't think a rich 24 year old kid, doing something that was widely considered an attack against the Establishment, is something that is highly unusual or bad. It doesn't seem fair to forever conflate Palmer with Trump or assume that he completely agrees with him. Maybe his tactics and philosophy are flawed, but I don't think his intentions are. Everyone's so quick to judge, demonize and forever cast people as bad. He admitted to funding trolling memes to support the current President of the United States? He has to go away forever now, and we all have to pretend not to like him?
- nxc18 10y ago
  I definitely agree people deserve second chances and make mistakes. Especially people who are young and have more money than they are accustomed to having. At the same time, it is really, really hard to look upon this charitably when he was screwing with something with such high stakes. I get that 24-year-old kids don't take much seriously, but for goodness sake don't use your money for political purposes without thinking it through. Heck, having millions of dollars makes me dislike him kind of like how people don't like Hillary for being successful and having millions. At least Hillary took her position seriously and attempted to look like she was trying to do the right thing, vs Palmer's 'shitpost 4 days, memes r life' bullshit.
  - brandonmenc 10y ago
    > it is really, really hard to look upon this charitably when he was screwing with something with such high stakes Putting up a childish billboard of questionable strategic value promoting a candidate for president is "screwing with something with such high stakes?" Hyperbole?
    - michaelbuddy 10y ago
      2016 revealed just how thin skinned, conspiratorial and fatalistic the tech community is. Hence the drop in participation around here.
  - pnathan 10y ago
TwoBit 10y ago
Why choose a headset (or any product) due to one person who clearly doesn't represent the company and who the company distanced themselves from and have apparently now fired?
- smt88 10y ago
  So that the person in question doesn't get any of your money

dsaw 10y ago

Can you elaborate on why/how did you find Oculus more polished? Note : I have a Vive, which I bought after researching both (so I might be biased)

baby 10y ago
Yup, for having tried both, the Vive is far superior to the Oculus.
marricks 10y ago
I am certainly biased, despite having huge issues with Oculus. My experience is Vive demos and second hand. Setup was just placing cameras on a desk. I don't need external headphones. Store is curated, which is good and bad. I like trusting games won't give me nausea, or turn off people to VR. In my experience all it takes is one experience for some people to continue repeating "VR causes nausea" for literally 1+ year. My boss is this person, and it's hard to get him to try rift again. Touch, and seeing my fingers closely mirrored in VR, I find extremely polished and wonderful. Grabbing the first object in VR made me laugh in excitement, first time I did that since seeing Tuscany in CV1.
conception 10y ago
From most reviews the Oculus is very plug and play whereas the Vive takes a couple of hours to get all setup and calibrated correctly.
- dahdum 10y ago
  Oculus doesn't have room scale, and just got touch recently. It's easier to setup something with half the functionality.
  - TwoBit 10y ago
    Oculus certainly has some room scale. I use it fine in my 12x12 room. It's otherwise better than the Vive in a lot of ways. Asw, atw, screen door, audio, comfort, clarity across the fov, controllers, apps. The bigger room scale is about the only thing the Vive does better.
    - dahdum 10y ago
      Oculus needs 3 tracking devices for room scale, and is still smaller and buggier. Games are required to be designed for 180 degrees instead of 360 like the vive. Vive is also getting wireless headset support this quarter (TPcast). Oculus poured far too much money into paying off developers for exclusive titles than trying to compete on technology, and as far as I can tell are falling further behind.
      - TwoBit 10y ago
        I've read that the wireless options are coming tonRift as well. Why wouldn't they? Oculus just doesn't talk as much publicly. 360 tracking works for me with three sensors. The Rift is less expensive than Vive now too. It seems like you are cherry picking your facts, which indicates you have technology religion. So no point discussing with you.
        dahdum 10y ago
        I have both....you cherry picked yours too. There is a large difference in experience, and I'm just endlessly annoyed Rift hasn't delivered on their promises, and buy exclusives vs develop tech. I'd say I'm a fair weather fan of either tbh. I'm sure I came across as more argumentative than I meant to be.
dkonofalski 10y ago
I'm not the OP, but I have both the Oculus and the Vive and, to me, the Vive is a much better experience. For me, the big issue is that, while the Rift is a bit easier to set up (but not by much), the tracking is just not good enough to get that immersive experience. As soon as you lose tracking once, it throws the whole thing out the window. The Vive's tracking is pretty flawless. The Rift, on the other hand, is finicky and, if you even attempt the room scale setup with touch, you'll feel like someone trying to mess with an analog TV antenna. With the Rift, I'm initially impressed with it (resolution is better, headset is lighter, etc) but then constantly reminded that this is new tech. With the Vive, it's clunkier and more pixelated (not by much) but I forget completely about all of it when I'm deeply immersed in a game.
- ehsanu1 10y ago
  You've got room scale setup with 3 cameras? Note that there were huge problems with the software a couple of releases ago that were recently resolved. Tracking is really smooth and solid right now for me personally on Oculus.
- sleepybrett 10y ago
  Tracking might be "resolved" but man three usb3 cameras + the usb3 for the headset, is a hard sell on a lot of systems. Most people who are successfully running 3+ camera roomscale deployments have at least one if not two extra usb3 cards in their machine. They just made a big mistake going with camera tracking, the lighthouse solution just seems much more scalable.
  - meheleventyone 10y ago
    I actually think the opposite. Camera based tracking is the future and the Lighthouse stuff whilst good right now is going to something of a dead end. In the future we're going to be using inside-out tracked headsets which will be highly reliant on camera tech. Even more so for a workable general use AR glasses solution. So perhaps more fiddly to setup now hurting consumer adoption but better in the long term?
meheleventyone 10y ago
Not the OP either but I use both extensively at work and haven't paid my own money so subject to less bias in that sense. I've also had a fair run at everything from Cardboard to the Hololens over the last couple of years. Once setup I find the tracking similar. The main advantage of the Vive is the ability to track a larger space. Outside of arcades this is a bit of a non-issue currently as most users don't have that much space. A lot of users also don't tend to walk around that much or at least more tentatively due to the tether. The Touch controllers are much better ergonomically and offer more input options. But they are also less non-gamer friendly. The Vive wand suffers from being enormous with badly placed buttons. Headset wise the Rift is a clear winner right now. It's lighter, has a much better harness and the integrated headphones remove a lot of the faff factor putting it on. Vive is releasing kits that address some of this later in the year. Store wise Oculus does a better job of surfacing products that will meet consumer expectations. Mostly because there are less hobby projects clogging it up and the exclusive content so far has been good. Then you can still head over to Steam, itch and others to explore more questionable variety.

mikewhy 10y ago

> Interestingly enough I asked him specifically on an AMA if he planned on staying at Oculus, his answer was an emphatic yes A year ago he said "I don't have plans to do anything else, so no real lamentations!", that seems like less than emphatic yes to me.

cr0sh 10y ago

VR is anything but an "infant" field. Maybe today's incarnation, maybe amongst consumers. But the idea of "gloves and goggles" goes back a long way - with its first real implementation happening by Ivan Sutherland ("Sword of Damocles" and the lesser known "Twinkle Box" for tracking in the late 1960s), then later work done in the 1980s and 90s by NASA, VPL Research, and Jarod Lanier, among others (which started the first VR wave). If you have an interest in VR now, and you haven't already, you owe it to yourself to check out the history of this fascinating, if still nascent and buggy, field.

yrro 10y ago
Horizon: Colonizing Cyberspace is an informative (and nostalgic!) overview of the field in the early 90s. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VuZonQVN4uw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VuZonQVN4uw
mrbill 10y ago
My high school senior English class research paper was on VR ... in 1993. Lanier featured heavily as he was one of the "public faces" of the technology back then, with all of the high-dollar stuff coming out of JPL. I remember buying a Nintendo Powerglove in college and hooking it up to the parallel printer port on a '486 just so we could use it to move around a couch in a virtual room on the screen (in REND386 if I'm remembering things correctly; it's been 21 years). Anybody else remember the Amiga-based "Dactyl Nightmare" game where you stood in a pod with a goggles helmet on? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v6t69mp0ZhE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v6t69mp0ZhE

pillowkusis 10y ago

>He was young (still is) enthusiastic, idealistic, relatable to me. I would not describe him as idealistic or relatable. He's a self-identified Trump supporter/donator[0] and definitely has some alt-right leanings. Regardless of your politics, I think it's fair to say that someone with his political leanings is not considered "relatable" by a decent portion of Americans. [0]: http://www.theverge.com/2016/9/23/13025422/palmer-luckey-oculus-founder-funding-donald-trump-trolls http://www.theverge.com/2016/9/23/13025422/palmer-luckey-ocu...

marricks 10y ago
I completely agree. My meaning was he seemed like that to me in 2013, and many others for that matter. Also he is still young.
drawnwren 10y ago
It's very odd in 2017 that so many people are being socially disqualified because their political ideology doesn't align with San Francisco's.
- agreedasdfs4 10y ago
  Oh come on, that's overly-simplified. Aligning with Trump is aligning with some pretty dreadful behaviors and attitudes about people that aren't: 1) Rich 2) White 3) American
- pcwalton 10y ago
  Fortunately, that's not what's happening.
  - ta0684 10y ago
    It is on Hacker News.
- EpicEng 10y ago
  Eh, with Trump I have to disagree. He has shown time and time again that he is a petty, egotistical sicophant with little regard for humanity in general. He's a documented liar and swindler. I have a hard time giving his supporters the benefit of the doubt and I am certain ly no San Francisco liberal.

kirrent 10y ago

I got a Rift over a Vive partially because I knew him, or at least knew of him, on the benheck forums back when we were all kids trying to make our own portable consoles. I was always impressed by his work ethic and designs. Enthusiastic, idealistic, and relatable were perfect ways to describe him back then as well.

girvo 10y ago
I miss those forums. My portable GameCube never got finished

engx 10y ago

I don't think a rich 24 year old kid, doing something that was widely considered an attack against the Establishment, is something that is highly unusual or bad. It doesn't seem fair to forever conflate Palmer with Trump or assume that he completely agrees with him. Maybe his tactics and philosophy are flawed, but I don't think his intentions are. Everyone's so quick to judge, demonize and forever cast people as bad. He admitted to funding trolling memes to support the current President of the United States? He has to go away forever now, and we all have to pretend not to like him?

nxc18 10y ago
I definitely agree people deserve second chances and make mistakes. Especially people who are young and have more money than they are accustomed to having. At the same time, it is really, really hard to look upon this charitably when he was screwing with something with such high stakes. I get that 24-year-old kids don't take much seriously, but for goodness sake don't use your money for political purposes without thinking it through. Heck, having millions of dollars makes me dislike him kind of like how people don't like Hillary for being successful and having millions. At least Hillary took her position seriously and attempted to look like she was trying to do the right thing, vs Palmer's 'shitpost 4 days, memes r life' bullshit.
- brandonmenc 10y ago
  > it is really, really hard to look upon this charitably when he was screwing with something with such high stakes Putting up a childish billboard of questionable strategic value promoting a candidate for president is "screwing with something with such high stakes?" Hyperbole?
  - michaelbuddy 10y ago
    2016 revealed just how thin skinned, conspiratorial and fatalistic the tech community is. Hence the drop in participation around here.
- pnathan 10y ago

TwoBit 10y ago

Why choose a headset (or any product) due to one person who clearly doesn't represent the company and who the company distanced themselves from and have apparently now fired?

smt88 10y ago
So that the person in question doesn't get any of your money