4 ms·

How Palmer Luckey Created Oculus Rift

42 points by staunch 12y ago

pixie_ 12y ago
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.
- iandanforth 12y ago
  Were there any demos that required you to read text? That always been the hard thing for me.
  - pixie_ 12y ago
    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.
ilaksh 12y ago
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.
ObviousScience 12y ago
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.
- qq66 12y ago
  They must have had something unique, or Carmack would have probably created his own company instead of joining Oculus...
  - 1457389 12y ago
    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.
gumby 12y ago
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...
- ary 12y ago
  Do you care to elaborate a bit? This is a pretty extraordinary claim.
  - gumby 12y ago
    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-headset-its-backing-oculus-rift http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2014-01-17-valve-has-no-vr... http://www.reddit.com/r/oculus/comments/2ewj4a/oculus_and_valve_still_partners/ 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!
- Klinky 12y ago
  Sure you're not confused with Jeri Ellsworth's and Rick Johnson's castAR tech? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technical_Illusions#castAR http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technical_Illusions#castAR
  - gumby 12y ago
    Thanks, but I am definitely not confusing the two.
  - rasz_pl 12y ago
    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.
staunch 12y ago
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.
- sillysaurus3 12y ago
  ... 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.
  - billions 12y ago
    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.
  - staunch 12y ago
Animats 12y ago
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.
- ilaksh 12y ago
  http://controlvr.com/ http://controlvr.com/
  - Animats 12y ago
    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

42 points by staunch 12y ago

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.

iandanforth 12y ago
Were there any demos that required you to read text? That always been the hard thing for me.
- pixie_ 12y ago
  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.

ilaksh 12y ago

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.

ObviousScience 12y ago

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.

qq66 12y ago
They must have had something unique, or Carmack would have probably created his own company instead of joining Oculus...
- 1457389 12y ago
  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.

gumby 12y ago

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...

ary 12y ago
Do you care to elaborate a bit? This is a pretty extraordinary claim.
- gumby 12y ago
  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-headset-its-backing-oculus-rift http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2014-01-17-valve-has-no-vr... http://www.reddit.com/r/oculus/comments/2ewj4a/oculus_and_valve_still_partners/ 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!
Klinky 12y ago
Sure you're not confused with Jeri Ellsworth's and Rick Johnson's castAR tech? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technical_Illusions#castAR http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technical_Illusions#castAR
- gumby 12y ago
  Thanks, but I am definitely not confusing the two.
- rasz_pl 12y ago
  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.

staunch 12y ago

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.

sillysaurus3 12y ago
... 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.
- billions 12y ago
  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.
- staunch 12y ago

Animats 12y ago

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.

ilaksh 12y ago
http://controlvr.com/ http://controlvr.com/
- Animats 12y ago
  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