The story of Oculus VR—the virtual-reality company that Facebook agreed to acquire on Tuesday—has the shape of a contemporary fairy tale. Its youthful protagonist, Palmer Luckey, has a Grimm-esque name that bluntly implies good fortune, now seemingly realized in the form of two billion dollars in stock and cash from Facebook. As a teen-ager, Luckey was drawn to science fiction—in particular, to virtual reality. In college, inspired by the futuristic visions of “Snow Crash,” “The Lawnmower Man,” and “The Matrix,” he set out to make affordable virtual-reality technology a commercial reality.
In his garage, Luckey dismantled head-mounted displays that he’d collected from around the world, in an attempt to see how they worked. Then, despite his lack of formal engineering training, he decided to build a better product than what he called the “sorry” examples that he’d tried. Soon after, Luckey dropped out of college to work full time on creating a virtual-reality headset, a project that, he said, had become an “obsession”—the kind of perilous gamble needed to set up any good plot. In June, 2012, he loaned one of his prototypes to John Carmack, the creator of Doom 3 and a pioneer of 3-D in video games, and Carmack took a virtual-reality-enabled version of Doom 3 to a high-profile video-game conference in Los Angeles. The demo enthralled the audience, and, two months later, when Luckey launched a Kickstarter campaign to develop the prototype into a working product, he raised more than a million dollars in two days. Additional money followed (ninety-one million dollars in venture-capital funding to date), enough to allow Luckey to hire Carmack and to begin work on a high-definition version of the headset, called Oculus Rift.
Enthusiasts began to design games for a prototype version of the headset, tailored for game developers. This pre-release Oculus Rift went on sale, for three hundred dollars, in March, 2013. (A consumer version isn’t available yet.) In the game Private Eye, inspired by Alfred Hitchcock’s “Rear Window,” the player assumes the identity of a wheelchair-bound detective spying on a building. In another, Classroom Aquatic, the player is cast as a young dolphin trying to cheat on a test. (A YouTube clip of a ninety-year-old grandmother trying the headset for the first time has been viewed more than two million times.)
Shuhei Yoshida, the president of Sony Computer Entertainment, thanked the Oculus Rift team at the 2014 Game Developers Conference, in San Francisco, last week, even as he unveiled his company’s own rival virtual-reality headset, code-named Project Morpheus. When Mark Zuckerberg announced that Facebook had agreed to acquire Oculus in order to “build the next major computing platform that will come after mobile,” the fairy tale seemed to be complete.
Or maybe not. Zuckerberg’s enthusiasm for Oculus Rift seems genuine enough. “People who try it say it’s different from anything they’ve ever experienced in their lives,” he wrote in a Facebook post announcing the deal. And his grand vision for the technology is compelling. “Immersive virtual and augmented reality will become a part of people’s everyday life,” he said in a call to investors on Tuesday night, describing a future in which people are able to “enjoy a court side seat at a game, study in a classroom of students and teachers all over the world, or consult with a doctor face to face—just by putting on goggles in your home.”
But Oculus’s identity is rooted in Luckey’s garage, where the protective goggles lay strewn with soldering irons, and hara-kiri head-mounted displays spilled their wire guts onto the workbench. It’s tied to amateur developers building brash, experimental software and to everyman backers on Kickstarter. For these people, Facebook’s corporate sheen is ill-suited to what they viewed as Luckey’s vision. Markus Persson, the outspoken creator of Minecraft, wrote, on his blog, “I did not chip in ten grand to seed a first investment round to build value for a Facebook acquisition.” (None of the Kickstarter contributors will benefit financially from the acquisition.) Persson also tweeted that he would cease work on the Oculus version of Minecraft that he had been developing.
Many others in the video-game industry felt betrayed, if in a nebulous and unfocussed way, and despite the fact that no promises had been broken. “I can palpably feel the oxygen sucked out of the room,” Andy Baio, one of Kickstarter’s creators, tweeted. “Infinite bright possibilities from indie game devs, quietly shelved.”
“Facebook is not a game tech company,” Persson wrote on his blog. “Facebook has a history of caring about building user numbers, and nothing but building user numbers. People have made games for Facebook platforms before, and while it worked great for a while, they were stuck in a very unfortunate position when Facebook eventually changed the platform to better fit the social experience they were trying to build.”
There are clear benefits to Facebook’s investment: the social network offers virtual reality an entry point into the mainstream, allowing the technology to reach a broader audience more quickly than would otherwise have been possible. But there are costs, too, even aside from the enthusiast community’s disappointment. Major companies often have a stultifying effect on the agile startups that they buy, no matter how much they intend to remain hands-off. Also, if Zuckerberg believes that virtual reality will eventually replace cell phones, then it’s difficult to believe that Facebook will remain only a supportive onlooker in the Oculus team’s process.
Jaron Lanier is a virtual-reality pioneer who now works at Microsoft Research. (Jennifer Kahn wrote a Profile of him in 2011.) When, in a recent interview, I asked him about the potential drawbacks of virtual-reality technology, like Oculus Rift, for consumers, he said, “If it’s used as a way to help people know themselves more, and if the person is the power center rather than the remote company, then it will aid education and can be joyous and beautiful. But if it’s used as a spying tool or a way to make advertising work more effectively, then it will gradually hurt people.”
On Wednesday morning, Luckey took to Reddit to answer questions by those who may share Lanier’s concerns. “We are not going to track you, flash ads at you, or do anything invasive,” he wrote. This may not, however, be Luckey’s choice; Zuckerberg had already suggested otherwise. During the call with investors on Tuesday night, Zuckerberg, when asked how Facebook intends to make Oculus profitable, said that the company will first focus on getting it into as many hands as possible, and then create “a network where people communicate and buy virtual goods.” He added, “There might be advertising in the world.” Signs of tension between the Facebook and Oculus fairy tales were already visible then, only hours after the announcement.
Above: Palmer Luckey. Photograph courtesy of Oculus Rift.
