A Not so Luckey Reality
Palmer Luckey. Not many people have heard this name, and why should they. It was only seven years ago that he was sitting in his parents garage tinkering with different tools and fixing iPhone's for a quick buck. Since then however, he has made one of the most outstanding and technologically advanced piece of equipment that anybody has ever seen outside a movie. From his garage to a multi-billion dollar company known as the Oculus Rift. Oculus is a virtual reality headset that makes the player experience video games as if he or she was in the world. So how did Palmer create this organization? Was it his smarts, or did he get a little Luckey.
Luckey grew up in Long Beach, California with his parents, David and Julie Luckey, as well as his three sisters. His father was a car salesman and his mother was a stay-at-home mom. Luckey was always fascinated by electronics, and since he was home-schooled by his mother, he was able to spend most of his time tinkering around in the garage. When he was 15, Luckey began to modify different video game systems. He would take them apart and then put them back to together. “Modding was more interesting than just building things entirely using new technologies,” Luckey told Taylor Clark of Smithsonian magazine, “It was this very special type of engineering that required deeply understanding why people had made the decisions they made in designing the hardware.” When he was 16, Luckey started a business to help repair iPhone's.
Luckey was a fun, geeky sort of person. He would always wear casual clothing to business meeting and is known for his Hawaiian shirt and sandals even though he says he would rather be barefoot. “We invented shoes to protect our feet from the harsh environment,” he told the Telegraph. “But I live in modern-day California. It’s pretty safe here. Nothing’s going to happen if I take them off.”
Luckey was also a gamer and that contributed greatly to his personality and what he would become. He wanted to feel the experience and in order to do so, he set up multiple screens to go with his computer. Some experienced gamers use two monitors when they play there game because it gives them better graphic results. Luckey had six monitors all around him so he could feel like he was trapped in the game. When he looked back this time in his life, Luckey just said he catchphrase, “It was sick.”
Luckey didn’t just stop at six monitors, he wanted to become the character within the video game. So he decided to buy and take a look at the virtual reality used in the military for training purposes and see what it was like. Since military VR goes for $100,000 so he expected them to be good. He ended up being incredibly disappointed with the results of the military VR. He told Smithsonian magazine that the field of view was narrow, and the head movements gave tremendous lag causing him to get nauseous (which was one of the drawbacks of earlier VR). Luckey decided to do what he did with other video game systems, mod it and create what is known now as Oculus.
For three years, Luckey worked on his new Oculus project at the University of Southern California and posted all his ideas for someone to take. In an interview with Forbes, Luckey said that he posted all his ideas online and that he would have been happy if someone took it. Nobody wanted to take the risk that Luckey’s idea would be another virtual reality bust. In 2012 however, video game programmer John Carmack found one of Luckey’s posts and asked if he could buy a VR from him. Luckey sent him one for free and in return, Carmack showed the system off at E3 (electronics entertainment). Carmack ended up joining Oculus in 2013.
The VR system started booming after it’s appearance at E3. In July 2012, three other video game developers (Brandon Iribe, Nate Mitchell, and Michael Antonov) agreed to help found the company Oculus Rift with Luckey. The catch was that none of them have ever used the Rift and made the investment off what others were saying about it. Iribe explained his mindset on investing into the rift, “Palmer described the Rift in such a compelling way that we wanted to do it without even seeing it,We thought, Why not?” When Luckey met them to show off the Rift in his classic Hawaiian shirt and sandals, Iribe was blown away. But Palmer's luck wouldn’t end there.
“Sure enough, it really worked. And we all looked at each other like, Oh, my God.”
-Brandon Iribe on the Oculus Rift
In 2014 Mark Zuckerburg, the founder of Facebook, got involved with Oculus and bought the company for 2 billion dollars. Luckey struck rich at the age of 21. However, Facebook and Oculus didn’t get along well and problems began for Luckey only three years later. Oculus wasn’t reaching its expected sales and on top of that it was getting sued by ZeniMax, former company of now Oculus worker John Carmack, for copying code that was used in different ZeniMax products. Carmack denied the accusations and was let off of all charges by jury in February of 2017. Facebook was not so lucky and they had to pay out $500 million is legal costs.
Luckey went under more scrutiny for posting Anti-Hillary hate memes during the recent election in 2016 on the social media platform, reddit, under the username NimbleRichMan. Luckey’s immaturity started to shine and people began to be upset with his public presence. While Luckey thought his “shitposting” as its called in Reddit community was just “a jolly good time,” one Reddit user was particularly disappointed in the way Luckey utilized his new found technology and fame. The Reddit account that has since been deleted commented,
“VR has the potential to make internet communication more heartfelt and real. But Palmer has decided to use his capital to support a fucking meme factory that delves online discussion into racist, angry, anti-intellectual bullshit.”
Internet memes were also a downfall for Luckey. His picture on the cover of time magazine showed him leaping into the air barefoot on a beach with his virtual reality goggles on. The picture was photo-shopped all around the internet, putting him with Jack on the titanic or showing him riding a dinosaur. Luckey was just so easy to make fun of, that it was hard for him to keep a good professional image. “ He [Luckey] is not cool and doesn’t want to be,” wrote Julie Wong of The Guardian. “Luckey has spoken about the potential value of virtual reality for education, and VR boosters tend to hype its potential to increase human empathy by expanding our ability to experience other people’s lives … at heart, Luckey doesn’t appear as invested in the transformative possibilities of his technology as we might hope [and] Luckey’s involvement in the Trump meme machine suggests that his investment in the social good of technology is indeed shallow.” Luckey was dropped from Facebook in 2017.
Luckey has gone under the radar since the incidents with Time and Reddit and Brendan Iribe took over as the face of Oculus. Iribe has recently shifted to the PC development side of Oculus so the company is currently looking for a new CEO. Iribe is excited with the future of Oculus.
“As we’ve grown, I really missed the deep, day-to-day involvement in building a brand new product on the leading edge of technology … You do your best work when you love what you’re working on. If that’s not the case, you need to make a change. With this new role, I can dive back into engineering and product development. That’s what gets me up every day, inspired to run to work.”
-Brandon Iribe
Luckey has nothing to be ashamed of. A nobody from California just created one of the most ambitious and world changing products we’ve ever seen. It was his indifferent personality and quirky characteristics that led him out of the CEO position. Even though Brendan Iribe will go down as the king of the virtual world, Palmer Luckey will go down as the god.