Today marks ten years since the start of Oculus. I decided to drop out of school when I was 19 to make a go at turning my extremely niche hobby of building high-performance head-mounted-displays into a business that could get everyone interested in VR and AR. It took a couple hours to come up with the name, register the website, and spread the news on all the internet forums I frequented. It would take almost two months to get back final paperwork for Oculus LLC from the California Franchise Tax Board, of course!
Just a few days short of five years later, I was fired from my own company.
I learned a lot of lessons and made a lot of money along the way, and my new company Anduril wouldn’t be where it is if it wasn’t for Oculus. Over the next year, I am going to try to distill some of those lessons into vignettes others might find useful, posting more or less in time with the decennial of various Oculus milestones (crowdfunding, fundraising, shipping, acquisition, termination, etc). I have quite a bit to share, especially regarding portions of Oculus history that have been subject to extensive revisionism in public accounts. This year is also the right time to finally unveil some VR technologies I haven’t been able to talk about for a variety of reasons. For now, though, I just want to share the first official communication from Oculus VR, the “About” page text from oculusvr.com posted on April 15th, 2012:
Let me get this out of the way: I am a huge HMD nut. As far as I know, I have the largest private collection of unique HMDs in the world, totaling 43 units, not including the ones I have built myself. Part of this HMD obsession, as with any other obsession, is trying to convince other people to join in. And what a seductive dream, that technology can transport us into worlds we cannot hope to experience in real life, or augment our reality to shape it closer to our desires!
Unfortunately, virtual reality has risen and fallen many times, with a lot more emphasis on the latter portion. The tech has never gotten far enough to be truly convincing, and great VR hardware has been far out of reach for the average person… Until now.
Oculus is my tilt at trying to change that. The tech has improved, and we can build hardware and software that is better, stronger, and faster than the old guard, companies that create niche, wildly expensive products. Don’t get me wrong, these companies are important, and they have to solve some very tough engineering challenges to satisfy their customers. But the reality is that as gamers and dreamers, we have a different set of challenges to meet. Massive field of view to engulf your visual senses, low latency tracking to maximize presence, light weight and comfortable for long term use, and perhaps most importantly, prices measured in the hundreds of dollars, not tens of thousands. I have worked long and hard with a lot of brilliant people to try and meet those challenges, and now it is time to put it in your hands.
Why the name “Oculus? Because it is the Latin word for “eye”, and someone used the word in a meeting several months ago. I thought it was a nifty word, and was better than the alternative, “StepN2theGAME”.
And there you have it.
Best,
PalmerTech