Palmer Luckey, who founded Oculus and was later dismissed by Meta, explains a new partnership between Meta and defense contractor Anduril. The U.S. loses more service members in training than in combat. High-fidelity VR simulators can cut those deaths by letting soldiers practice dangerous scenarios safely.
you know, I wasn't just fired from Facebook. Facebook acquired my company. So I started Oculus when I was 19 years old, and I had been building VR headsets since I was 15 years old. And so by the time they fired me, you're talking about a decade. You're talking about basically my entire adult life and most of my teenage life. This is your baby. This is your soul. It was. Look, I was Oculus and Oculus was me. I was, I was, you know, it was, it was, it was everything to me. What we're doing is teaming up to build the world's best AR, VR, and in-between systems for the United States government, allied government, partner governments, including military, state, local law enforcement, kind of this, this entire world that's been hugely underserved by the existing XR community. There's not really a lot of work out there applying these technologies which are critical. I think I still strongly believe that immersive computing is the future and there's not really anyone who's bringing that technology into the military. Did you know the United States loses more servicemen in training than every form of combat death combined? What would it take to eliminate every form of combat death? I mean, hundreds of new technologies. It's almost unthinkable. What would it take to eliminate most training deaths? Basically just really good virtual reality simulators. I mean, it's kind of crazy how low-hanging the fruit is. And so maybe the way to put this is there's a lot of things in Meta that I invented, that my team invented before they acquired us. There's other things that I invented, that the team invented while I was at Facebook, now Meta. And there's a bunch of technology that was invented after I was fired. And this partnership is about taking that entire base of technology IP around hardware, software in the AI, VR, AR space and applying it to solving our military's most pressing challenges.
