For centuries human beings have dreamed about alternate realities, virtual spaces, artificial intelligence. There have been phew advances in the field: Palmer Luckey changed it all. Not your normal teenage boy, he was home schooled and curious, cracking things open to see how they work. When he was 16 he began his studies at California State University but did not finish.
Luckey gained a lot of experience while experimenting with lasers, tesla coils and coil guns. He even built many head-mounted displays and a PC worth tens of thousands of dollars. All of his projects were financed by repairing and selling iPhones that were once damaged. Luckey’s passion of sailing and boats became another income source. He sometimes repaired boats and served as a sailing coach.
ModRetro Forums is a website he founded in 2009, there, users were able to discuss about all kinds of devices, game consoles, hardware modifications and of course PCs. But Luckey’s biggest passion was the notion of a virtual reality.
Such thing as virtual reality was unthinkable couple years ago, companies have spent billions and billions to try to make it work, sadly the time was not right. Most of these people working on that field were about to drop the matter, that was until Luckey started messing around with it.
Luckey says that most of the gadgets out there were too heavy and too expensive plus the resolution was terrible. He began to work on how to make it lighter, cheaper and better than any other headset on the market; and so he did, in his parent’s garage. Luckey built the first reality device that could be accessible to all public, he called it Oculus Rift.
Oculus VR, his company was the starting point and it raised $2.4 million. The company was acquired by Facebook in 2014 but Luckey continues working on his devices.