The History of the Future

Oculus, Facebook, and the Revolution That Swept Virtual Reality

Blake J. Harris

• Publisher: Dey Street Books
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9780062455987
• Topic: Technology & Engineering
• Subtopic: Science & Technology Biographies
• Index: Technology & Engineering

The author of Console Wars reveals the story behind Oculus and its quest for virtual reality: "Masterful... filled with unforgettable characters" ( Forbes ). From iconic books like Neuromancer to blockbuster films like The Matrix, virtual reality has offered a tantalizing vision of the future. But outside of a few research labs and military training facilities, this technology was mere science fiction. Until 2012, when Oculus founder Palmer Luckey—then just a teenage dreamer living alone in a camper trailer—invents a device that has the potential to change the world. With the help of a videogame legend, a serial entrepreneur, and many other colorful characters, Luckey's scrappy startup kickstarts a revolution and sets out to bring VR to the masses. What follows is the ultimate entrepreneurial journey, a tale of battles won and lost, lessons learned and shocking turns—including an unlikely multi-billion-dollar acquisition by Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg. Drawing on over a hundred interviews with the key players driving this revolution, The History of the Future weaves together a rich, cinematic narrative that captures the breakthroughs, breakdowns, and human drama of trying to change the world. The result is a supremely entertaining look at the birth of a game-changing new industry.

Part 1

The Revolution Virtual

Chapter 1

The Boy Who Lived to Mod

April 10, 2012

UNLIKE SO MANY SILICON VALLEY SUCCESS STORIES, THE TALE OF OCULUS doesn’t begin in a garage, a dorm room, or a small skunkworks lab. Instead, in a twist befitting the humble origins and pragmatic eccentricities of its founder, the tale of Oculus begins in a trailer.

More specifically: a beat-up, second-hand nineteen-foot camper trailer that, on the afternoon of April 10, was parked in the driveway of a modest, multifamily home in Long Beach, California. The bottom floor of this home belonged to the Luckeys—Donald, a car salesman, and Julie, a homemaker—and the trailer belonged to their nineteen-year-old son: Palmer. He had been living in there for nearly two years now, and based on how things in his life had been going as of late, Palmer Luckey seemed destined to keep living there for years to come.

From the outside, Palmer Luckey’s trailer looked absolutely ordinary. Tinted windows, fiberglass shell, and corrugated once-white siding that had faded to beige. But inside, from end to end, it had been modified to fit his own desires.

The first thing to go was the bathroom. It just simply took up too much space, he reasoned. As convenient as having a bathroom would be, there was already a perfectly fine bathroom that he could still use in his parents’ home. And if those facilities were occupied—as they often were by Luckey’s three younger sisters—he could go try the public restroom that was located next to the Laundromat three streets away. So, the trailer’s bathroom? That could go. So too could the trailer’s kitchen. He didn’t need a specific area devoted to preparing meals when his entire diet more or less consisted of frozen burritos, Mucho Mango AriZona tea and whatever he could afford at the Jack in the Box down the road. In fact, Luckey biked down to that Jack in the Box with such regularity that the manager gave him a special loyalty card entitling him to 15 percent off his meals (so special that, as Luckey would brag to friends, “it can be combined with other offers!”). Needless to say, Luckey wouldn’t be hosting any dinner parties in the near future.

When neighbors passed Luckey’s trailer, they would invariably feel a twinge of sadness—a guttural pinch of how-could-this-be. What had become of that kid with all the promise? That bright, bubbly homeschooled boy who had started taking college courses when he was only fifteen; who, last they had heard, was enrolled at Cal State, Long Beach, studying journalism, was it? But here he was, on this sunny Tuesday April afternoon—same as every afternoon, same as every morning and evening, too—holed away, doing God knows what in that monument of wasted potential.

There had always been signs that the Luckey boy was a little different: his obsession with Japanese anime; his affinity for Hawaiian shirts; his habit of excelling at things so inane (or obscure) that few people on earth had ever tried to excel at them before. For example: the ability to run without bending one’s legs; a talent that Luckey possessed in spades—and whose origin revealed how he tended to feel about rules. It wasn’t so much that he thought they were “meant to be broken” but rather that they deserved to be tested, quested, and—if there existed a clever work‑around—bested. So when, as a boy, the lifeguard at Luckey’s local pool kept chiding him for going too fast whenever he’d near a hustle—“No running at the pool!”—his response was not to slow down but instead to ask the lifeguard what constituted “running,” and then—after being told, “If you’re bending your legs, it’s running”—Luckey set out to try to master the art of sprinting with straight legs. Given the devotion to “hobbies” like that, it wasn’t a total shock that—even with his whip-smart intellect—Luckey would end up living alone in a gutted nineteen-foot trailer.

Now as desolate as this situation might appear to be, one key detail cannot be ignored: Palmer Luckey loved living in that trailer. It felt, to him, like living in a spaceship; a feeling that probably had as much do with his love of science fiction books as it did with his Tonystarkian personality; that of someone who doesn’t see the world as is, but rather who—defiantly, obsessively—sees things as they could be. Which is why Luckey took so much pride in how, after gutting it, he’d transformed that trailer into a makeshift laboratory.

The transformation began with the wide oblong cavity up front, which had been modified to fit Luckey’s six-screen computer setup, and extended all the way to the back where (instead of a bathroom) a twin mattress was propped up by a series of component-filled boxes. In between these two ends was where Luckey conducted his hardware experiments; from control boards and soldering irons to lens equipment and power supplies, this space was overrun with an unlikely alliance of gear, gadgets, and tools. Scattered about—serving as both evidence and inspiration for the chaos that occurred in this trailer—were a handful of funky, helmet-shaped prototypes for a product that was unlike anything else being manufactured in the world. All in all, it resembled Walter White’s mobile lab on Breaking Bad. But instead of being equipped to cook crystal meth, Palmer Luckey’s trailer was optimized for building virtual reality headsets.

His obsession with virtual reality had begun three years earlier, when he was sixteen years old. At that time, the idea of an engineer building a virtual reality headset was not all that different from an archaeologist searching for the Holy Grail. To the current world at large, the quest for great VR was considered nothing more than a fool’s errand. Unlike that mythological grail, however, virtual reality did exist, and had for quite some time.¹

In 1955, cinematographer Morton Heilig wrote a paper titled “The Cinema of the Future,” which described a theater experience that encompassed all the senses.² Seven years later, he built a prototype of what he had envisioned: an arcade-cabinet-like contraption that used a stereoscopic 3-D display, stereo speakers, smell generators, and a vibrating chair to provide a more immersive experience. Heilig named his invention the Sensorama and shot, produced, and edited five films that it could play.³

In 1965, Ivan Sutherland, an associate professor of electrical engineering at Harvard, wrote a paper titled “The Ultimate Display.”⁴ In it, Sutherland explicated the possibility of using computer hardware to create a virtual world—rendered in real time—in which users could interact with objects in a realistic way. “With appropriate programming,” Sutherland explained, “such a display could literally be the Wonderland into which Alice walked.”

Three years later, with assistance from a student named Bob Sproull, Sutherland built what is considered to be the first-ever virtual reality head-mounted display (HMD) system: the Sword of Damocles.⁵ Unlike the Sensorama, the Sword of Damocles actually tracked the user’s head movements (and, instead of film, placed users into a computer-generated world). But there was one major problem with Sutherland’s breakthrough: his HMD weighed so much that it had to be hung from the ceiling (hence the name “Sword of Damocles”).

Due to the exorbitant costs and perceived lack of consumer interest, this type of reality-defying research remained primarily in labs for the next twenty years. That changed in the late ’80s with VR pioneer Jaron Lanier, whose VPL Research became the first company to go to market with virtual reality goggles. Although the company’s flagship headset, the “EyePhone 1,” was prohibitively expensive ($9,400), and required a multimillion-dollar workstation to power it, the sci-fi-like spectacle of VPL’s products (plus the budding fame of Lanier, credited with coining the term “virtual reality”) helped generate a cultural fascination for the technology.^6,7,8 Meanwhile, as consumer interest was piqued, the fervor among researchers also accelerated. This was aided in no small part by a company called Fake Space Labs, founded in 1991 to develop hardware and software for high-end scientific and government projects.

The hype for virtual reality seemed to multiply by the year. By the mid-’ 90s, VR was all the rage. Or, perhaps more accurately, there seemed to be unanimous consent that VR was going to be all the rage. But a decade full of flops (like Nintendo’s Virtual Boy) and failures (like Virtuality, whose arcade initiative ended in bankruptcy) transformed the hype around VR into a cautionary tale.^9,10,11 When the ’90s came to an end, virtual reality was no more than the butt of a whatever-happened-to joke in the company of jetpacks and flying cars.

Given this fate, it may seem odd that a homeschooled, self-taught engineer like Palmer Luckey would have ever become interested in a subject matter as culturally radioactive as VR. Yet in an odd way, Luckey was uniquely qualified to try and resurrect this thought-to-be-dead technology due to his contrarian way of thinking, his love of retro-gaming (particularly ’90s classics like Chrono-Trigger, Pokémon Yellow and Super Smash Bros.) and his life-defining passion for modifying hardware—or “modding” in the parlance of hackers, gamers and tech enthusiasts.

Specifically, Luckey was interested in a subset of modding called “portabilizing,” which involved hacking of old game consoles into playable portable devices. Given that this was a highly technical, time-consuming hobby, there weren’t all that many portabilizers out there. But there were enough that in June 2009, Luckey decided to cofound an online community called “ModRetro” that would cater to those who shared his niche interest.

With web forums, chat rooms and a motto of “Learn, Build, Mod,” ModRetro sought to attract the world’s best, brightest and most curious portabilizers. And for the most part, Luckey’s community achieved that objective. But along the way, in the course of discussing projects and sharing work, something else happened: the purpose-driven relationships that ModRetro cultivated wound up becoming lifelong friendships.

“Man, ModRetro days were the best,” Luckey would reflect years later. “We accidentally built a personal support community alongside the actual modding work—most of us were growing through similar periods in our life, and all of us were strange nerdy kids. For a lot of us, ModRetro was more important than any real-life group of friends.”

Like many close friendships, those at ModRetro were imbued with a playful spirit of one-upsmanship. This type of banter didn’t just keep the chat lively; it pushed everyone to try and be better; to build faster, smaller, and as cheaply as possible. To really up the ante, community members would endeavor to do all that with the most obscure piece of hardware they could find. Which, inevitably, is what led Luckey to eBay in search of some virtual reality headsets.

After making his first few purchases, tinkering around, and learning about the VR landscape, Luckey soon came to a critical realization:

As much as Luckey loved portabilizing consoles, he knew that even the coolest N64 portable would never change the way people live. But virtual reality, potentially, could. For example, he had read about something called “Bravemind,” which was a virtual reality exposure therapy system that could help treat those suffering from posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD).¹² Unlike previous treatments, where patients are forced to recall (and reimagine) traumatic scenarios, Bravemind enables therapists to virtually re-create those experiences—a city street in Afghanistan, a desert road in Iraq—and then walk patients through these re-creations under safe and controlled conditions.

Really, the only “limit” to the limitless possibilities of VR was computing power. The faster computers got, the better the graphics would be and the more real virtual worlds could feel. And if it felt real enough—if you could bestow users with a true sense of presence—then VR could achieve almost anything. It could reinvent...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Dedication
• Epigraph
• Contents
• Foreword by Ernest Cline
• Author’s Note
• Prologue
• Part 1: The Revolution Virtual
• Part 2: How to Build a Company
• Part 3: The Good Old Days
• Part 4: Politics
• Epilogue
• Acknowledgments
• Notes
• Photo Section
• About the Author
• Praise
• Also by Blake J. Harris
• Copyright
• About the Publisher