In this interview Maxim Perumal recounts his unconventional path into virtual reality. Growing up as the only child in a remote French countryside, he spent his early teens immersed in online communities, especially Minecraft, where he built servers, wrote Java mods, and forged friendships via TeamSpeak. At 14 he discovered the Oculus Kickstarter and, lacking funds, decided to build his own VR headset. With the mentorship of a math professor, he taught himself physics, compression, and firmware, eventually constructing a functional Oculus‑like headset for a few hundred dollars by age 15. His prototype attracted attention from Facebook (now Meta); David Marcus and chief Oculus architect Atman Binstock invited him to the US, where he realized the challenges of competing with a hardware giant and that his vision for VR diverged from theirs. Choosing pragmatism over a startup, he returned to France, open‑sourced all hardware, software, and SDKs he had created, hoping a community could collectively develop the platform. This decision led him to abandon high school, attending only the final exam, and focus entirely on the open‑source VR project.
Chapters
Your story is such a unique one that it's really worth going over. So I would love to start from your origin story and what led you to where you are today.
Sure, sure. So, all right, the origin story. Well, I guess let's start with this. I mostly grew up in the countryside of France. And my dad is an artist, he's a painter, and he lives literally in the middle of nowhere. And so we had this huge house full of books and arts and paintings, but with no one around it. So I was like the only kid in my village. And then we got a computer and I started making friends online. And I started— a huge portion of what I do would actually be going on online. I went deep into Minecraft, started building virtual worlds in Minecraft, essentially building servers, making new friends. And then I randomly came across the Oculus Kickstarter from Palmer Luckey.
Oh, wow. Long time ago.
Yeah, a long time ago. I probably was 14 at the time, 14 years old. And I thought, well, this is the thing that I need. I'm living here in the middle of nowhere in the countryside. I'm making all those friends online, and a good chunk of the things I love doing are happening online. You know, I'm on Minecraft writing Java code to create my custom servers. I'm on Minecraft designing those texture packs, those mods, and we're hanging out with my friends on TeamSpeak. And I don't think Discord was around back then, so it probably was Skype. And with this device, with this Oculus, I could really be with them and we could spend this time together. And so I kind of got absolutely obsessed with that. And I had no money. I was a teenager. I couldn't afford to buy an Oculus. And so I thought, well, maybe I can build one by myself. And I was extremely lucky. I had this crazy, crazy math professor who also taught me programming. And I told him about this idea of mine of wanting to build a VR headset. And I came up with a bunch of things I needed to learn in order to do that. Just basic physics to be able to calculate the position of the users, learning how to do compression more efficiently so I would be able to transmit data from the headset to the computer faster. I just came up with all those questions. And And he gave me math classes, and I started just working on that thing. And luckily enough, it worked out. And so by the time I was 15 years old, I had basically built with a couple hundred dollars that my math professor gave me, I'd essentially built the same thing as an Oculus. So I'd built my own VR headset from scratch, same features as an Oculus, built it alone.
Wow.
And then I started playing along, playing with it, spending a lot of time using it, posting about it online. And that's when Facebook at the time, now Meta, heard about it. And luckily for me, David Marcus came across it. I don't know if he still remembers me, but that changed my life. David Marcus saw this and introduced me to Atman Binstock, who was the chief architect of Oculus. And they invited me over to the US. They flew me out to the USA. I got to spend some time with the people over at Facebook, realized how hard it is to build a hardware company. I also realized that as much as I loved what they were trying to build, that my vision for the future of VR was different and not really aligned with theirs. And so what I did is I came back to France as a 15-year-old teenager, took everything I had built. So I had built the hardware, I built the software, I built the firmware. I even built pretty bad SDKs. But still, I built SDKs at the time and I open sourced everything, all of it.
You open sourced everything?
Everything I had built.
Instead of making a company out of it?
When I was in the Valley, I had people very interested in the headset I had created.
Interested in using it, or you mean interested in investing?
Interested in making it go to market, basically. Okay. But yeah, I decided that instead I would take all of it, open source it, and see what happens.
Why?
Why? Well, First off, I think that I was very realistic about the fact that as a 15-year-old, it would be unbelievably hard for me to get enough capital and basically to do all the things that I would need to do in order to be a serious competitor to Oculus. It was very clear to me that I didn't have the tools to do that at the time. And so if I cannot do that, then the other option is just sell, sell it, right? And although that sounded good, it just came to my mind that another option was actually maybe I could try to distribute the making of that headset. And maybe I personally, I'm not ready to compete with Oculus, but maybe if I can convince a few hundred or maybe a few thousand people to build the headset themselves and build software for it and build tools for it, Maybe as a group we stand a little bit more of a chance. And that was my thesis. Open sourced it, worked pretty well. I wasn't really going to school much at the time, but that put the nail in the coffin and made me completely stop going to school.
And this was high school or uni already?
High school. High school. Although I wasn't really attending.
So you didn't go to high school after a few years? You're like, this is enough for me?
I just came back for the final exam. And that's it. Yeah.
I hope that didn't feel like too much of a chore. The exam itself was unbearable.
Oh, no, that's fine. My math professor did something really— I call him sensei. He did something pretty crazy for me when we were in middle school. He just told me, hey, if you want to make high school sort of more enjoyable, why don't you do the entire curriculum now while you're still in middle school? And this way you have a lot of free time in high school. So that's what I did. And so regardless, high school was just like a big playground for me because I'd already done all the stuff with him.
