
How Palmer Luckey Created Oculus Rift - staunch
http://www.smithsonianmag.com/ist/?next=/innovation/how-palmer-luckey-created-oculus-rift-180953049/?all
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ilaksh
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.

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staunch
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
... 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.

~~~
staunch
> _... 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.

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Animats
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
[http://controlvr.com/](http://controlvr.com/)

~~~
Animats
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

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

~~~
pixie_
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.

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

~~~
1457389
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.

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gumby
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...

~~~
Klinky
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)

~~~
rasz_pl
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.

