Palmer Freeman Luckey (born September 19, 1992) is an American entrepreneur. He is the founder of Oculus VR and designer of the Oculus Rift, a virtual reality head-mounted display. Luckey ranks #22 on Forbes' 2016 list of America's richest entrepreneurs under 40.
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Early life
Luckey was born and raised in Long Beach, California, with three younger sisters. His father worked at a car dealership.
As a child he was homeschooled by his mother, took sailing lessons, and had an intense interest in electronics and engineering. He took community college courses at Golden West College and Long Beach City College beginning at the age of 14 or 15, and started attending courses at California State University, Long Beach in 2010. He wrote and served as Online Editor for the university's student-run newspaper, Daily 49er.
During his childhood and teenage years, he experimented with a variety of complex electronics projects including coil guns, Tesla coils, and lasers. He built a PC gaming "rig" costing tens of thousands of U.S. dollars with an elaborate six-monitor setup.
He had an intense interest in virtual reality (VR), and built an extensive private collection of over 50 different head-mounted displays.
To fund these projects, he earned at least US$36,000 by fixing and reselling damaged iPhones and working part time as a groundskeeper, youth sailing coach, and computer repair technician.
In 2009, he founded the ModRetro Forums with friend Chris Dycus, creating an online community for "potabilization", a hobby that revolves around turning old hardware devices such as game consoles and PCs into self-contained portable units mixing new and old technology.
During his time at Cal State Long Beach, he worked as a part-time engineer at the Mixed Reality Lab (MxR) at the Institute for Creative Technologies (ICT) at the University of Southern California as part of a design team for cost-effective virtual reality.
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Development and growth of the Oculus Rift
Luckey was frustrated with the inadequacy of the existing head-mounted displays in the market, which suffered from low contrast, high latency, low field-of-view, high cost, and extreme bulk and weight. In response, he started experimenting with his own designs in 2009. He completed his first prototype, called PR1, at age 17 in his parents' garage in 2010, which featured a 90-degree field of view, low latency, and built-in haptic feedback.
Luckey developed a series of prototypes exploring features like 3D stereoscopy, wireless, and extreme 270-degree field-of-view, while also decreasing size and weight of his systems. He shared regular updates on his progress on MTBS3D, a forum frequented by a small number of virtual reality enthusiasts. His 6th-generation unit was named the "Rift", intended to be sold as a do-it-yourself kit on Kickstarter crowdfunding website to fellow enthusiasts. He first started Oculus VR in order to facilitate the official launch of the Kickstarter campaign.
John Carmack of id Software, a notable game developer famous for his work on the Doom and Quake videogame series, requested a prototype headset and used it to demonstrate a modified version of id Software's Doom 3 BFG Edition on the device at the Electronic Entertainment Expo 2012. With the resulting attention of thousands of people suddenly drawn to the Rift, Luckey dropped out of university to focus on it full time.
He showed an early prototype to Brendan Iribe, a former executive of Gaikai and Scaleform, who described it as "dangling wires and circuit boards and duct tape and hot glue all over the place" and invested "a few hundred thousand" U.S. dollars in the Rift's Kickstarter campaign. Iribe later joined as Oculus VR's CEO, and Michael Antonov (former CTO of Scaleform) joined as chief software architect. Luckey also demoed the unit to Valve, and received Kickstarter endorsements from Valve's managing director Gabe Newell and prominent veteran Michael Abrash (now Chief Scientist at Oculus VR). During the Kickstarter campaign, Luckey demoed the Rift to gamers and the press at many gaming conventions, including PAX, Gamescom, and QuakeCon 2012.
The Kickstarter campaign was successful, raising US$2.4 million, or 974% of its original target. As a result, Oculus VR expanded, taking on more employees and a larger office space, but Luckey described his day-to-day process as not having "changed all that much," remaining a "slow plod towards making this thing a reality." After launching DK1, Luckey continued to work on all aspects of the business, saying, "I have my hands in everything, from product engineering to game development to marketing," Later, he shifted his focus towards virtual reality input hardware, calling it his "pet project".
Oculus VR was acquired by Facebook in March 2014 for US$3 billion, and although his share is not public, Forbes magazine estimated the founder's net worth to be $700 million in 2015. Today, he continues to work at Oculus VR on core VR technology.
Public image
Luckey has become "the face of virtual reality in gaming" and a celebrity among virtual reality enthusiasts; however, he doesn't consider himself to be a celebrity. He has a casual appearance: he is frequently barefoot, and prefers sandals to shoes even at trade shows and events.
Luckey lives in a shared house with several others where they regularly play multiplayer videogames, and he typically wears casual clothes like shorts, T-shirts, Hawaiian shirts and sandals.
Awards
In 2016, Luckey was awarded the Royal Photographic Society Progress medal and Honorary Fellowship, which is awarded in recognition of any invention, research, publication or other contribution which has resulted in an important advance in the scientific or technological development of photography or imaging in the widest sense.
Political views
Libertarian
In September 2016, Luckey stated he is a libertarian who supported Libertarian Party politicans like Ron Paul and Gary Johnson in the past.
Trump Support
In 2016, it was reported that Luckey had donated $10,000 to Nimble America, a pro-Trump group that ran a billboard campaign displaying 2016 presidential candidate Hillary Clinton with the caption "Too Big To Jail".
This caused a number of developers to temporarily cancel plans to support Oculus, including Scruta Games, who said they would cancel Oculus support in their games until Palmer stepped down.
Scruta Games announced they would be resuming work on Oculus Touch support, saying they had "failed to find any evidence backing up the Daily Beast's claim that Luckey paid for hate speech". Tomorrow Today Labs, developers of Newton VR, said they would not support the Oculus touch as long as Luckey is employed by Oculus. Tomorrow Today Labs later announced that they would, in fact, work with Oculus, but only due to the company's conglomeration into Facebook.
Source of the article : Wikipedia
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