Palmer Luckey built his first VR headset at 16 by salvaging old hardware from eBay and studying military research. His PR1 prototype had a wide field of view and weighed six to seven pounds. By 18 he'd founded Oculus, crushed a Kickstarter in two hours, and eventually sold it to Facebook for billions.
Chapters
Where's this all going? In the long run, it's immediately obvious, right? It's virtual reality. It's the ability to feel like you're literally inside of the video game, to feel like it is reality. And whatever technology makes that possible, that's clearly where this is all going someday. There's disagreement as to when, but I don't think anyone would believe, like, oh no, gaming is like never going to get there. Nobody wants. It's obviously what's going to happen. That's why it's such a science fiction staple. So I started working on VR when I was 15 years old. I built my first prototype headset myself when I was 16 years old. So it took me a while to learn about VR, to try a bunch of old VR tech. I read a whole bunch of old patents from the 80s and 90s. I was reading all of these academic studies about VR. I was reading all these military research papers about virtual reality. I was just like downloading into my brain everything I could about what worked, what didn't. Also buying a lot of old hardware. So back then, old VR headsets were dirt cheap. Cause nobody was collecting them. I was probably the only guy in the whole world collecting them. So I'm going on ebay and I'm looking at all of this stuff being sold by like medical facilities shutting down, that have some headset that was used as part of a research trial in the late 90s. And like I'm buying this stuff that they bought for literally hundreds of thousands of dollars for less than $100. I ended up building this like collection of old hardware and I'm taking it apart, I'm learning from it, realizing what worked, what didn't. And so when I built my first headset, I called it PR1 prototype one. And that way it was kind of like I'm putting a stick in there, like this is the first thing I'm building. It was a wide field of view virtual reality headset, 3D compatible, but it also weighed like six or seven pounds. It was this huge helmet that went on your head. It was so uncomfortable, so ungainly. But it was kind of the first thing that proved this experience. Like the visual side is clearly way better than gaming on a monitor. And. And so I kept working on it, building new prototypes. And then I did that for years. And then when I was 18 years old, so two, almost three years later, I had been showing prototypes to my friends for years and they all thought I was kind of off my rocker, right? Like, I wish I could say my friends were supportive, but they're not. Every prototype that I had shown him up to, this one that I made when I was 18, was honestly not very inspiring, unless you could had a really good imagination. You had to imagine what was going on. And then when I showed it to people and it was the first prototype that I'd ever shown them where they said, oh, shit, I finally get it. That's when I started Oculus. So I started my company after I showed it to people and said, they finally, instead of saying, I don't get it, they said, holy shit, I finally get that this is going somewhere. And so I started Oculus and ended up doing a Kickstarter for that, and we were really successful. We hit our goal in, like, two hours, and we ended up making this incredible headset, working with a bunch of game developers, getting it all out there, and of course, in the long run, ended up selling that to Facebook for a few billion dollars. That's where I got my money.
