Palmer Luckey

Palmer Freeman Luckey (born September 19, 1992) is an American entrepreneur and inventor best known as the founder of Oculus VR and the designer of the Oculus Rift, the head-mounted display that is widely credited with reviving consumer interest in virtual reality in the 2010s. After Facebook acquired Oculus in 2014 for about 2 billion dollars, Luckey worked on the consumer Rift before leaving the company in 2017. That same year he founded the defense technology company Anduril Industries.

Early life

Luckey was born in Long Beach, California, on September 19, 1992, the eldest of four children. He was homeschooled by his mother and developed an early interest in electronics, building projects that included railguns, Tesla coils, and lasers. As a teenager he attended local community colleges, including Golden West College and Long Beach City College, and he later enrolled at California State University, Long Beach, where he studied journalism.

To fund his hardware experiments, Luckey repaired and resold damaged smartphones, a side business that he has said brought in tens of thousands of dollars. He also worked at the University of Southern California's Institute for Creative Technologies, where its Mixed Reality Lab exposed him to high-end virtual reality systems used for research.

Early headset tinkering

In 2009, Luckey co-founded the ModRetro Forums, an online community devoted to "portabilization," the hobby of rebuilding game consoles into handheld units. Through that community and related interests he became active on Meant to be Seen 3D (also known as MTBS3D), a stereoscopic 3D discussion forum, where he posted under the username PalmerTech and shared progress on his homemade headsets.

Luckey collected a large personal library of commercial and research head-mounted displays so he could study their optics and shortcomings. Devices he has owned or used include the Vuzix VR920, Philips Scuba, Virtual Research V8, Liquid Image MRG 2.2, and Sensics X-Sight. He concluded that existing consumer headsets offered narrow fields of view and high latency, and he set out to build something better.

Prototypes

Working in his parents' garage, Luckey built a series of prototype head-mounted displays that he numbered PR1 through PR6:

• PR1
• PR2
• PR3
• PR4
• PR5
• PR6

The PR1, completed while he was a teenager, is reported to have offered roughly a 90 degree field of view with low latency. Later units pushed the design further. PR4 had wireless capability, used a halo headband, and was sent to tester Andrew Hernandez for several weeks of evaluation. The PR5, which Luckey worked on in early 2012, used tiled displays and optics to reach about a 270 degree field of view and also had wireless capability.

Founding Oculus VR

Luckey founded Oculus VR in April 2012 to commercialize his headset designs. One of his prototypes drew the attention of programmer John Carmack of id Software, who requested a unit, adapted it, and used it to demonstrate a virtual reality version of Doom 3: BFG Edition at the Electronic Entertainment Expo (E3) in June 2012. The demonstration generated substantial press attention and helped establish the credibility of the project. In August 2012, Brendan Iribe joined as chief executive, with Luckey continuing as the public face of the company and the designer of its hardware.

Oculus Rift Kickstarter (2012)

On August 1, 2012, Oculus launched a Kickstarter campaign for a developer kit version of the Oculus Rift, with a funding goal of 250,000 dollars. The campaign passed its goal within about a day and closed in September having raised roughly 2.4 million dollars, well above the original target, backed by thousands of supporters. It carried endorsements from prominent industry figures including John Carmack, Gabe Newell of Valve, and Cliff Bleszinski. The crowdfunding success is often cited as a turning point that brought renewed mainstream and developer attention to virtual reality.

Developer Kit 1 (DK1) shipped to backers beginning in early 2013, and a second iteration, Development Kit 2 (DK2), followed in 2014. Oculus also raised outside venture funding during this period, including a round led by Andreessen Horowitz, and John Carmack joined Oculus as chief technology officer in 2013.

Facebook acquisition (2014)

On March 25, 2014, Facebook announced an agreement to acquire Oculus VR for a deal valued at approximately 2 billion dollars. The terms included 400 million dollars in cash and 23.1 million shares of Facebook common stock valued at about 1.6 billion dollars, based on the average closing price over the 20 trading days before March 21, 2014, plus an additional earn-out of up to 300 million dollars in cash and stock tied to performance milestones. Facebook chief executive Mark Zuckerberg said at the time, "Mobile is the platform of today, and now we're also getting ready for the platforms of tomorrow. Oculus has the chance to create the most social platform ever, and change the way we work, play and communicate." The transaction closed in July 2014.

The acquisition was a surprise to much of the gaming community, and some Kickstarter backers and developers publicly objected to a crowdfunded hardware project being sold to a large social media company.

Consumer Oculus Rift

Under Facebook, Oculus continued developing the Oculus platform and the consumer hardware. The first commercial Oculus Rift, known as the CV1, was announced in January 2016 and released on March 28, 2016, at an introductory price of 599 dollars in the United States. The headset shipped with an Xbox wireless gamepad, with the motion controllers known as Oculus Touch arriving later in 2016. Luckey remained associated with the product as a co-founder and public figure for the brand through this period.

Departure from Facebook

In September 2016, The Daily Beast reported that Luckey had financially supported Nimble America, a pro-Trump group that produced internet memes opposing Hillary Clinton during the 2016 United States presidential election. The report drew criticism within the technology industry, and several virtual reality developers said they would pause or withdraw support for the Rift. Luckey posted an apology in which he said, "I am deeply sorry that my actions are negatively impacting the perception of Oculus and its partners," and stated that his actions were his own and did not represent Oculus.

Luckey kept a low public profile afterward, and Facebook confirmed on March 30, 2017, that he was leaving the company, saying, "Palmer will be dearly missed. Palmer's legacy extends far beyond Oculus." Facebook did not give a detailed reason for the departure, and the company has denied that Luckey was forced out because of his political activity. In 2018, The Wall Street Journal reported that Luckey had told people he believed his support for Donald Trump contributed to his exit, and the newspaper cited internal communications it said showed executives had encouraged him to publicly back libertarian candidate Gary Johnson; Luckey has since described reaching a financial settlement with Facebook over the circumstances of his departure.

Anduril Industries

In 2017, Luckey co-founded Anduril Industries, a defense technology company, together with several former executives of the data analytics firm Palantir. The company builds autonomous systems and military hardware, including uncrewed aircraft and sensor towers, integrated through a software platform called Lattice that fuses data from drones, cameras, and sensors into a single command interface. Its products include surveillance towers deployed along the United States border and the Ghost family of drones. Luckey serves as the company's founder and a leading public spokesperson.

Anduril grew rapidly into one of the most highly valued private defense companies in the United States, winning contracts with the U.S. Department of Defense and allied governments and reaching a valuation in the tens of billions of dollars in later funding rounds.