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The Story of Oculus Rift
An anonymous reader writes: A lengthy new article details the history of the Oculus Rift, from the VR headset's stereotypical beginnings in a hacker's parents' garage to its $2 billion acquisition by Facebook. "Luckey got into VR by way of computer games, which he was obsessed with for a time. After building what he recalls as a "beautiful six-monitor setup," for extreme visual saturation, he wondered, Why not just put a small screen directly on your face?" At just 19 years old, Luckey built a prototype good enough to impress John Carmack, which brought him all sorts of further attention. Investors came running, and eventually Mark Zuckerberg took an interest. "When Zuckerberg arrived, Luckey introduced himself and then quickly walked away. 'I'm a big fan,' he said, 'but I actually have to get back to work.' ... Zuckerberg seemed taken aback by Luckey's brusqueness but also charmed. 'They definitely have the hacker culture that we have,' he says." As the device approaches release, they're all wondering how much VR will change the world.
google cardboard pretty much makes this tech obsolete. my cell phone plus $20 headset and I have the same thing.
Pay no attention to all the technologies that came before it.
hackers: this is going to be awesome and we are going to revolutionize 3d immersive gaming and computing with your kickstarter help
Zuckerberg: I will literally choke you with a dick made of cash until you sell this to me.
hackers: We are going to buy a mansion in mansion land now. your funding has helped us build a solid gold toilet in this mansion. so, thanks.
Good people go to bed earlier.
Oculus became completely irrelevant to me as soon as FB bought it. I'll wait to see what Valve comes up with.
Luckey made a big mistake by selling his company to Zucker. Despite what Facebook depicts with its hackercups and other "hack" stuff, Facebook has no "hacker" spirit. On the contrary, they will try to make profit-only.
The link to the article is dead: http://www.vanityfair.com/news/2015/09/oculus-rift-mark-zuckerberg-cover-story-palmer-lucky
What I'm curious about is to why all of the articles detailing the history of Oculus VR omit the subsequent gutting of Autodesk Scaleform for staff.
In 2012, two of the co-founders of Scaleform, Michael Antonov and Brendan Iribe, cashed out of Scaleform shortly after it was bought by Autodesk - Brendan left in late 2011, but Michael stayed on to prevent an excessive amount of brain drain while Scaleform brought on more engineers.
Shortly after Michael and Brendan joined Oculus VR, from Scaleform they poached Andrew Reisse (senior engineer, RIP: killed by a high speed pursuit while taking a walk), Artem Bolgar (senior engineer) and JP Ratliff (senior support staff), and I would wager good money that they would have also brought along Maxim Shemanarev (the mind behind Anti-Grain Geometry, on which Scaleform is based) had he not already died due to unspecified medical complications.
Everyone seems to want to tout Palmer Luckey and John Carmack as the brains behind Oculus VR, but if it weren't for the people like Artem and Michael handling (I'm assuming) the interface libraries that the Oculus VR uses to communicate with the underlying game engines, and the influx of VC from Brendan, I'm not so sure that Oculus would have actually made such a stir or lasted long enough to even be acquired by Facebook.
Full disclosure: I don't work for Oculus VR, I don't hold any shares in Oculus VR, I'm just an interested party who got to see the best and brightest of his coworkers get rampantly poached by Oculus VR.
Mind you, Valve's stuff is supposed to be out by the time the Rift comes out, so it'll be possible to directly compare them before I'll be in a position to buy. I'm not ruling them out. But overall I like the Rift's odds, based on what I've been reading.
PHEM - party like it's 1997-2003!
"he wondered, Why not just put a small screen directly on your face?"
And then, by pure chance, built a perfect replica of the previously built and sold VR-headsets with little more difference than updated hardware to current spec.
Being an owner of a VFX-1 VR headset I can tell you that there are very little the oculus can do that the VFX-1 did not. The VFX-1 had shittier screen and headtracking that was more work to calibrate but It did have sound... and a heft price tag. What the Occulus is is a rehash of old tech with modern hardware... innovation == zero.
I was that 19 year old 25 years ago. I was brusque, I was in my bubble, I played with electronics and jokingly wanted to create "sexual electronics" to connect people together with "peripherals". Nobody with tons of cash came to me, and now I'm a nobody.
Make money, kid, while the sun shines.
But it's coming real soon now right?
Just waiting to die so I can stop reading about stupid human trifles.
It seems like every startup from Apple to HP to Oculus is said to have started in the garage. Why do we never read about a startup starting up in the kitchen or the living room? Especially in California where it would seem that the lack of AC in the garage would be a major deterrent.
If Lucky is the kind of person who is a big fan of Zuckerberg, fuck him and I hope he gets hit by a bus. Seriously, fuck you fucks you are ruining technology for the rest of the shaved apes.
It's apparently also very similar to what he built while employed by a company called Total Recall (who now have a lawsuit against Luckey and Oculus for fraud). Coincidentally, Zenimax has another lawsuit against Luckey and Oculus for design ideas they claim were taken from them after Luckey signed a non-disclosure agreement with them as well.
http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:-4K82JVInzMJ:www.vanityfair.com/news/2015/09/oculus-rift-mark-zuckerberg-cover-story-palmer-lucky+&cd=1&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us
soo teen has a ton of money to fuck about with computers. lucky for him.
Zenimax has another lawsuit against Luckey and Oculus for design ideas they claim were taken from them after Luckey signed a non-disclosure agreement with them as well.
It has nothing to do with tech, Zenimax guys are just pissed that Carmack got out of their clutches and ended up richer than them.
When all you have is a hammer, every problem starts to look like a thumb.
No Linux support, no buy. I'll get whichever model has higher resolution than 4k and full Linux support.
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My brother recently pick one of the recent rift devices off Kijiji and I helped him get it running. These things are absolutely amazing. If you haven't tried one, definitely do. It will blow your mind. Having said that, 10 minutes of roller coaster demo made me nauseous for something like 3 hours. Yes, I know all the customization with lenses and intraocular distance etc. etc. can help reduce this, but until the sick is absolutely gone, this will never take off the way Oculus hopes it will.
It's rather a sad story about kickstarter "backers". People support a project and risk losing their money and projects fails and most of them fail.
"9,522 backers pledged $2,437,429 to help bring this project to life." (oculus rift on kickstarter.com)
Yet even in rare cases when a project is a huge success, backers don't get anything from that success. No right to influence direction in which the project develops either.
it didn't do anything truly useful
it didn't work with any prescription glasses frames that I choose to purchase
it cost an astonishingly high 1500 and could only be had at horribly inconvenient locations
With the Rift and Facebook together, there is only one piece missing, the VR space itself. That piece is in development at Linden Lab, makers of Second Life, code named Project Sansar. If they can make it work, then probably get acquired by Facebook, all the parts will be in place.