Although they introduced some geometric distortion, Luckey knew this could be compensated for with modern graphics hardware. The low-cost lenses provided the necessarily wide field of view. The solution he devised was to build a headset with a single screen and two lenses. The missing link, he thought, was the right optics.
Many of the key challenges in creating virtual reality, he realized, had been solved by the makers of mobile phones and handheld games: Powerful mobile processors, high-fidelity graphics software, and precision motion trackers were all available. The time began for Luckey in 2009, at age 17, when he started tinkering with the head-mounted displays then available.
“Duct-taping a strap and hot-gluing sensors onto Luckey’s early prototype Rift and writing the code to drive it ranks right up there. (Initially, Carmack split his time and continued to work at Id, but this past November he left to focus on Oculus.) “I have fond memories of the development work that led to a lot of great things in modern gaming-the intensity of the first-person experience, LAN and Internet play, game mods, and so on,” Carmack blogged about his new position at Oculus. In the greatest endorsement, John Carmack, the cocreator of Doom and Quake-who is considered by many to be the industry’s greatest graphics programmer -joined Oculus as chief technology officer in August following the death of original CTO Andrew Scott Reisse in June 2013.Ĭarmack compares work on the Rift to the early days of Id Software, the company he cofounded in 1991 that repeatedly revolutionized both computer graphics and gaming. “Crowdfunding, community, and hacking are driving many areas of innovation, and they’re leveraging that.” “The folks at Oculus understand the new world order in which we live,” says Cliff Bleszinski, the former design director at Epic. (creators of the Counter-Strike, Half-Life, and Portal series) and Epic Games (makers of the Gears of War titles). He has earned praise from game developers known for being on the bleeding edge of new technologies, such as Valve Corp.
Photo: Oculus VRīy figuring out how to make the technology both immersive and affordable, Luckey has become the boy wonder of the game biz. The headset-the Oculus Rift-should arrive early in 2014 for around US $300 and will allow third-party game developers to bring their creative skills to bear.įirst Look: Oculus is already producing headsets for game developers, with a consumer version expected this year. Today, Luckey’s in his own lab at Oculus VR, which has drawn attention for both the people on his team and their progress in creating a high-quality VR headset. But chunky displays, expensive hardware, lackluster games, and sluggish processing doomed these attempts. released the Virtual Boy “console,” built around a stereoscopic headset.
That wasn’t for lack of effort-in the 1990s the once-buzzed-about Virtuality Group put out a series of virtual reality arcade game machines, while Nintendo Co. military, it still wasn’t ready for mass market applications, such as gaming. “I grew up imagining it was some technology that people must have in a lab somewhere,” he recalls.īut although basic virtual reality technology had been around for decades and had been adopted by deep-pocketed entities such as the U.S. Coming of age in California during the dot-com boom, he assumed that brilliant geeks were already cooking up a fantastically immersive simulated world. He’d read about the cyberspace Metaverse in the novel Snow Crash, watched Keanu Reeves in The Matrix, and seen Jeff Bridges teleport into the world of Tron. Luckey was weaned on late 20th-century dreams of virtual reality. The Rift is the brainchild of 21-year-old Palmer Luckey, the founder of Oculus VR, a start-up in Irvine, Calif. So why should you believe us when we say that this is the year? Despite the potential, particularly in the world of gaming, numerous attempts have left players dizzy with disappointment, and just plain dizzy.
Virtual reality has been hyped as the next big thing for decades-and yet, it never seems to deliver.