Palmer Luckey Concepts

The History of the Future: Oculus, Facebook, and the Revolution That Swept Virtual Reality

by Blake J. Harris · 19 Feb 2019 · 561pp · 163,916 words

their little company for three goddamn billion dollars.1,2 “It’s unbelievable!” Zuckerberg continued. It was, it really was. Just two years earlier, Palmer Luckey had been living alone in a camper trailer. And now—with Oculus becoming the fastest start-up in history to reach a multibillion-dollar exit

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the world. All in all, it resembled Walter White’s mobile lab on Breaking Bad. But instead of being equipped to cook crystal meth, Palmer Luckey’s trailer was optimized for building virtual reality headsets. His obsession with virtual reality had begun three years earlier, when he was sixteen years old

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and 0’s—led to the creation of colors, images, and actions on a screen. But life behind the keyboard can be lonely. Like Palmer Luckey, Carmack found solace and purpose-driven friendship online, spending his teenage years hanging out on dial-up-accessible bulletin board systems—BBSs—where visitors could

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interesting to compare the relative merits of high FOV versus high resolutions versus high refresh rates Reading Carmack’s message from inside his messy trailer, Palmer Luckey could hardly believe his eyes. John Carmack, the man who had made several of his favorite games, wanted to borrow something that he had

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might be able to pledge some kind of support to Oculus. Feeling inspired, Luckey began scripting an overview for his Kickstarter project: “My name is Palmer Luckey,” he wrote. “I am a longtime stereoscopic 3D and virtual reality enthusiast, and currently work at the USC Institute for Creative Technologies. Over the

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VR, really?—but, like him, they saw a possible opportunity and wanted to explore this further. So Iribe asked Scallie for an introduction to Palmer Luckey; and then he tried to arrange a dinner with the young inventor. Which is why, beside that immaculately blue rooftop pool, Iribe kept checking his

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momentum with each sentence; segueing, tangenting, and bantering with great aplomb—it was clear to everyone around the table that there was something magical about Palmer Luckey. “Is it true you sent Carmack your one and only prototype?” Iribe asked. “No paperwork? No money? No nothing.” “Yep!” Luckey replied. “I mean . . .

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travel.” His admission seemed bizarre, until everyone at the table realized that they were all guilty of thinking the same thing prior to learning about Palmer Luckey. Deep down, they’d all known that VR didn’t really occupy that same sphere of apparent impossibility as time travel. After all, these

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really fun ride! Let me know what time you’re available tomorrow. Girlfriend first of course. Talk soon, —BRENDAN Shortly thereafter, Luckey replied: FROM: Palmer Luckey TO: Brendan Iribe SUBJECT: Oculus I really enjoyed the meeting as well, thanks to you and all your friends for convincing me out of my

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project: Create integrations with popular game engines (i.e., Unity, Unreal, CryEngine) Provide visual explanations of the hardware’s technical specifications and advantages Highlight Palmer Luckey’s unique backstory Get endorsements from trusted industry experts like John Carmack “Who else do you think we can get?” Mitchell asked, referring to endorsements

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least made an effort to avoid being blinded by his own familiarity. But perhaps most important, Mitchell learned to never expect a short answer from Palmer Luckey. No matter the scope of the question, the kid would almost always respond with some sort of eloquent elaboration. The inquiry could be as

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And with his word, on July 18, filming of the Oculus’s Kickstarter video officially commenced. Opening, of course, with none other than Palmer Luckey. “My name is Palmer Luckey, and I’m a virtual reality enthusiast and the designer of the Rift,” Luckey said, delivering the lines Mitchell had written to an eyeline

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and dad to China. This meant that Oculus’s most important meeting would come down to the company’s least polished founders: Michael Antonov and Palmer Luckey. Chapter 10 Valve! July 26–27, 2012 ON THURSDAYS, VALVE ORDERED IN LUNCH FOR THEIR EMPLOYEES. ON THURSDAY, July 26—the day that

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! We settled on a $40k salary for now. Did a lot of discussion about what I’d do, where the company’s going, etc. PALMER LUCKEY: Awesome! PALMER LUCKEY: Did you talk about QuakeCon? CHRIS DYCUS: Yeah, that I’d basically be slave to you and Nate. :P CHRIS DYCUS: And manning the

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all yet CHRIS DYCUS: Man. You have like no sense of planning.:P PALMER LUCKEY: Thank god for Nate PALMER LUCKEY: He is our creative director PALMER LUCKEY: And manages all kinds of things CHRIS DYCUS: Awesomesauce. PALMER LUCKEY: $40k is not bad considering the benefits PALMER LUCKEY: Free top of the line computer, free food, etc. CHRIS DYCUS:

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text from Iribe. This one had a copy of the aforementioned (and newly updated) cap table: STEVE LAVALLE STOCKHOLDER CLASS A CLASS B % OWNED Palmer Luckey 160,000 16% Brendan Iribe 160,000 16% Michael Antonov 110,000 11% Reserved for Seed Funding 300,000 30% Nate Mitchell 30,000 3

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much worse than amped up because, despite the risks and occasional rawness, he lacked his usual and necessary spark to light this revolution. They needed Palmer Luckey: unleashed . . . but with a few exceptions. They needed him to be conscious about how long he talked; not how he talked (he had

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crucially, they needed Luckey to keep things positive—not just when talking about Oculus, but when it came to partners, competitors, and people online. Palmer Luckey was a child of the internet, which implied that the congruity—between real life and online—was, to him, the epitome of authenticity. It was

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always superpassionate about head-mounted displays and virtual reality. And he wanted something that actually allowed him to jack into the matrix for video games. PALMER LUCKEY The biggest change is that we’ve developed our own motion tracker sensor chips . . . [which] gives us better data, more samples to work with

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like standard Palmer shenanigans.” Suddenly, GO was shouted and Oculus’s founder was on his way. Cheers erupted, and Hammerstein found himself momentarily mesmerized. Palmer Luckey was by no means fast, nor did he move with any particular grace; but when the clock was ticking, and all eyes were upon him

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online mob machine. However, a bunch of folks didn’t appreciate Carmack’s appreciation. Folks like Chad Elliot, a developer at Waypoint Software, who emailed Palmer Luckey to say, “Dude, I have great respect for John’s accomplishments and ability, but applauding Brendan Eich for sticking to his guns? Ugh. I

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in three months—he knew that, really, this was only the beginning of the journey. Chapter 38 Awaken the Sleeping Giants January 2016 “GROWING UP,” PALMER LUCKEY EXPLAINED, “I WANTED TO BE A SUPERVILLAIN.” “Wait. What?!” Joe Chen asked. “Did you say supervillain?” “I did!” “Yeah. So . . . once again: what?!” It

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could pull something like this off, but he was conflicted as to whether or not he should. This uncertainty persisted until a Reddit AMA that Palmer Luckey did in January 2016. “You might slightly misunderstand our business model,” Luckey explained to a Reddit user who was concerned about exclusivity. “When we

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differently; and in May 2015—on behalf of Total Recall Technologies (TRT), his and Seidl’s all-but-defunct partnership—Igra filed a suit against Palmer Luckey alleging “breach of contract and wrongful exploitation and conversion of TRT intellectual and personal property in connection with TRT’s development of affordable, immersive,

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They’d all but given up the idea of moving forward, until August 9, when they received an unexpected message from a potential benefactor named Palmer Luckey. THROUGHOUT AUGUST AND MOST OF SEPTEMBER, LUCKEY WAS PRIMARILY FOCUSED on hacking the HTC Vive so that Oculus could natively support. Between that, preparing

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Nimble America wasn’t a “scam” or “cash grab,” was by highlighting that they actually had backing from a wealthy benefactor. Since their benefactor (Palmer Luckey) wished to remain anonymous, this made things a little tricky, but after giving it some thought, Malinowski and Ward came to see opportunity in the

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logic and gave Yiannopoulos permission to make an introduction. And minutes later, Luckey received an email from the Daily Beast reporter: FROM: Gideon Resnick TO: Palmer Luckey BCC: Milo Yiannopoulos SUBJECT: Re: Gideon—meet Palmer Thank you, Milo, for connecting us. Moving you to BCC to continue the conversation with Palmer.

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Michael Malinowski, whom Luckey would later introduce to Resnick). Shortly after the call, Resnick followed up with a quick question: FROM: Gideon Resnick TO: Palmer Luckey Thanks again for taking the time to talk. So as a quick follow-up, are you “nimblerichman” on Reddit and did you post on Saturday

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to represent him, he believed that it would have been “intellectually dishonest” not to take responsibility for anything posted under the “NimbleRichMan” name. FROM: Palmer Luckey TO: Gideon Resnick The Nimble America team made the account, but yes, it represents me. As far as I know, there are no other wealthy

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Ben Collins—was published on The Daily Beast with the following juicy-but-false headline: The Facebook Billionaire Secretly Funding Trump’s Meme Machine Palmer Luckey—founder of Oculus—is funding a Trump group that circulates dirty memes about Hillary Clinton.3 BACK AT FACEBOOK—AS THE STORY BEGAN TO SPREAD

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same. And yet, whether they did or not, there were no corrections, clarifications, or retractions of the stories that had been printed. Instead, because Palmer Luckey = Racist Supervillain made for a clickable narrative, additional inaccurate stories continued to sprout. Luckey added them to his Google Document of lies. “I just finished

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replied. “It’s especially crazy,” Chen said, “because the nonembellished version would been enough to get clicks. If they’d just said something like: Palmer Luckey appears to like Donald Trump. But instead they throw in white supremacy and trolls and all this other shit.” “Never mind doxing Nicole,” Luckey added

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date. LAWYER: [presenting a cardboard box] And you packaged your headset into a United States Postal Service medium-sized box, flat rate Priority, correct? PALMER LUCKEY: That’s not an accurate representation of the box. USPS actually makes several different medium-sized boxes in different shapes. Some are longer, some are

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Questions like: Did ZeniMax prove, by a preponderance of the evidence, that any Defendant misappropriated the trade secrets claimed by ZeniMax and id Software? Did Palmer Luckey fail to comply with the nondisclosure agreement? Did any of the following Defendants contributorily infringe upon any of ZeniMax or id Software’s copyrights? If

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jury found. And did any of the named Defendants vicariously infringe upon any of ZeniMax or id Software’s copyrights? “Yes,” Judge Kinkeade announced. Palmer Luckey and Brendan Iribe were both guilty of this, the jury believed. And, they believed, the amount of damages that ZeniMax and id Software suffered as

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jury verdict—Judge Kinkeade would reduce the damages by half, to $250 million total, specifically eliminating the damages that went directly against Brendan Iribe and Palmer Luckey. In response to the 2018 ruling, Facebook vice president and deputy general counsel Paul Grewal would say, “a positive step toward a fair resolution,

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ways that could compromise the integrity of what we’re all doing. It had now been several weeks since the ZeniMax trial ended, and still Palmer Luckey was at home. His office—scratch that, his former office—sat untouched. Certainly not a conference room. CAITLIN KALINOWSKI In an environment like this

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We Interact with Computers.” CBS News, May 21, 2012. 7.LaValle, Steve. Planning Algorithms. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006. 8.Luckey, Palmer. “I Am Palmer Luckey, Designer of the Oculus Rift—AMA!” Reddit, August 28, 2012. CHAPTER 16 1.Poon, Timothy and Brian Crecente. “Oculus Lawsuit Testimony Details ZeniMax’s Negotiations

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Resnick. “Breitbart Editor Milo Yiannopoulos Takes $100,000 for Charity, Gives $0.” The Daily Beast, August 19, 2016. 3.Collins, Ben, and Gideon Resnick. “Palmer Luckey: The Facebook Near-Billionaire Secretly Funding Trump’s Meme Machine.” The Daily Beast, September 22, 2016. 4.Dash, Anil (@anildash). “One reason every political hashtag

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PST. 6.Pyle, Hunter. “Can I Be Fired for My Political Beliefs or Activities in California?” Hunter Pyle Law. August 30, 2018. 7.Menegus, Bryan. “Palmer Luckey, Millionaire Founder of Oculus Rift, Loves Donald Trump and Dates a Gamergater.” Gizmodo, September 23, 2016. 8.Cutler, Kim-Mai (@kimmaicutler). “@PalmerLuckey’s girlfriend.”

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Conference, Oculus, October 5, 2017. 2.Zuckerberg, Mark. Opening Keynote at “Oculus Connect 3” Conference, Oculus, October 5, 2017. 3.Mendelsohn, Tom. “Oculus Rift Inventor Palmer Luckey Is Funding Trump’s Racist Meme Machine: How Your Oculus Rift Is Secretly Funding Donald Trump’s Racist Meme Wars.” Ars Technica, September 23, 2016

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. 4.Wong, Julia Carrie. “Who Is Palmer Luckey, and Why Is He Funding Pro-Trump Trolls?” The Guardian, September 23, 2016. 5.Dewey, Caitlin. “The Three Types of Political Astroturfing You’ll

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Spat Cut to $250 Million.” Bloomberg, June 27, 2018. Photo Section In 2009, Luckey builds his first prototype headset: the PR1. (Photo courtesy of Palmer Luckey) In 2012, Luckey founds Oculus and poses with Chris Dycus (who will soon become the company’s first employee). (Photo courtesy of Chris Dycus) VR

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next challenge. (Photo courtesy of Jack McCauley) In June 2012, Luckey dines with Iribe and other members of the “Scaleform Mafia.” (Photo courtesy of Palmer Luckey) In July 2012, Iribe is blown away by Luckey’s virtual reality headset. (Photo courtesy of Michael Antonov) Software architect Mike Antonov is also blown

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of Michael Antonov) Oculus obtains the ultimate vote of confidence from Valve founder Gabe Newell, and legendary game programmer Michael Abrash. (Photo courtesy of Palmer Luckey) After launching one of the most successful Kickstarter campaigns of all time, Luckey heads to QuakeCon for a panel with his childhood hero John Carmack

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. (Photo courtesy of Palmer Luckey) In December 2012, Words with Friends co-creator Paul Bettner decides to take a chance on virtual reality. (Photo courtesy of Joe Chen) In

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Chen, whom Luckey calls the “ultimate foot soldier,” serenades his new colleagues at the 2013 Consumer Electronics Show. (Photo courtesy of Joe Chen) Oculus founders Palmer Luckey, Nate Mitchell, Mike Antonov, and Brendan Iribe autograph their first product. (Photo courtesy of Joe Chen) Before, during and after, Oculus steals the show

Facebook: The Inside Story

by Steven Levy · 25 Feb 2020 · 706pp · 202,591 words

in the early 1990s, the subject of dozens of rhapsodic feature stories. But the hype around it proved unfounded, and nothing much had happened. Until Palmer Luckey. In 2012, Luckey was a nineteen-year-old Southern Californian whose passion was miniaturizing old game consoles. He had long wished he could be inside

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Los Angeles. Luckey showed up in shorts, flip-flops, and an old Atari T-shirt. But the moment he began talking, it was clear that Palmer Luckey was a technology wunderkind. “You could ask almost any question about anything tech- or electronics-related, and he knew the back history stories around why

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. That patience did not extend to the performance of the Rift, which he described in an earnings call as “disappointing.” And then there was the Palmer Luckey problem. While the Oculus founder had participated in products like the hand controls for Rift, his time was increasingly spent as Facebook’s ambassador of

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hard at what role he could have after this situation happened,” says Iribe. Each technology division head at Oculus was asked if he could use Palmer Luckey, the guy whose invention had created the division. And not one said that they had a place for him. For all practical purposes

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, Palmer Luckey was fired. A few days later, Facebook hired an outsider, former Googler Hugo Barra, to become the new head of Oculus. Iribe was demoted, and

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6, 2019. Puerto Rico: Arjun Kharpal, “Mark Zuckerberg Apologizes After Critics Slam His ‘Magical’ Virtual Reality Tour of Puerto Rico Devastation,” CNBC, October 10, 2017. Palmer Luckey problem: Besides personal interviews, I drew on the primary documents and reporting in Blake Harris, The History of the Future. reporter thought otherwise: Gideon Resnick

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Funding Trump’s Meme Machine,” Daily Beast, September 22, 2016. they were abandoning the platform: Jeff Grubb, “Some VR developers Cut Ties with Oculus over Palmer Luckey Funding Pro-Trump Memes,” VentureBeat, September 23, 2016. “We care deeply about diversity”: Cory Doctorow, “VERIFIED Mark Zuckerberg Defends Facebook’s Association with Peter Thiel

Unit X: How the Pentagon and Silicon Valley Are Transforming the Future of War

by Raj M. Shah and Christopher Kirchhoff · 8 Jul 2024 · 272pp · 103,638 words

under his command. Richard Jenkins: British adventurer, entrepreneur, and founder of Saildrone, whose autonomous seagoing sailboats are revolutionizing marine science and U.S. naval strategy. Palmer Luckey: Founder of two “unicorn” companies: Oculus, maker of virtual reality headsets, and Anduril Industries, developer of hardware and software for defense. Jim Mattis: Secretary of

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when Paul Selva retired, would later remark. A third Founders Fund company, Anduril, also started shaking up the way the Pentagon acquired products. Its founder, Palmer Luckey, was only twenty-one years old when he sold his first company, Oculus Rift, a maker of virtual reality goggles, to Facebook for $2 billion

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still access it at home or through the 4G LTE cell networks that have continued to operate during the war. ANDURIL AND THE DRONE WAR Palmer Luckey’s wife tried to talk him out of going to Ukraine. “There are people in the military whose job it is to do that,” she

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true of Iraq or even Afghanistan. They see themselves potentially in Russia’s shoes, in more or less going to war against America.” Anduril’s Palmer Luckey is already anticipating the potential conflict. “Our entire internal road map has been around how do you deter China, not just in Taiwan, but Taiwan

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Dunnmon, Ryan Farris, Ben Fitzgerald, General Dave Goldfein, Lieutenant Colonel Vishaal “V8” Hariprasad, General Jeffrey Harrigian, Lisa Hill, Colonel Mark Jacobsen, Richard Jenkins, Andrey Liscovich, Palmer Luckey, Brendan McCord, David Merrill, David Rothzied, Lieutenant General Jack Shanahan, Reuben Sorensen, Lieutenant Wayne Starr, Trae Stephens, Admiral Sandy Winnefeld, and Deputy Secretary of Defense

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Competitive Studies Project, “Ukraine War Tech Lessons,” June 28, 2023, https://scsp222.substack.com/p/ukraine-war-tech-lessons. “I promise I will never die”: Palmer Luckey, interview with authors, July 26, 2023. having its fire directed by drones: “Game-Changers: Implications of the Russo-Ukraine War for the Future of Ground

The Long History of the Future: Why Tomorrow's Technology Still Isn't Here

by Nicole Kobie · 3 Jul 2024 · 348pp · 119,358 words

’ front drive managed to perfectly time his foray into VR headsets. After setting up a massive six-monitor rig to make gaming feel more immersive, Palmer Luckey realised it made more sense to have a headset. He started buying up the niche headsets that were still being made outside the mainstream, collecting

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deliver on your promise.”’ Like other AR, it was like ‘looking through a large floating window’, noted one review, with The Verge calling it ‘flawed’. Palmer Luckey took one apart alongside tech dissectors at iFixit to see how it worked, declaring it ‘tragic’, with the core, supposedly secret, technology consisting of ‘photonic

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, Apple or Meta or otherwise, one day live up to the reality? Probably – these are engineering challenges, and with a few more Jaron Laniers or Palmer Luckeys, perhaps they’re the solvable kind. But it remains to be seen whether we want to see a digital overlay in front of our eyes

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23, 1993. https://biturl.top/UjQnAb Friedman, Vanessa. ‘But Would You Wear It?’ New York Times, June 6, 2023. https://biturl.top/rquiim Gault, Matthew. ‘Palmer Luckey Made a VR Headset That Kills the User If They Die in the Game.’ Vice, November 7, 2022. https://biturl.top/QNbaqq Gershgorn, Dave. ‘Apple

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. Heim, Michael. The Metaphysics of Virtual Reality. New York: Oxford University Press, 1993. https://biturl.top/yIfaIf Huddleston, Tom, Jr. ‘Three things Oculus co-founder Palmer Luckey splurged on when Facebook bought it for $2 billion.’ CNBC, October 26, 2018. https://biturl.top/6vI7Bv ‘Slower Growth for AR/VR Headset Shipments in

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metaverse the here Microsoft HoloLens here motion sickness here, here, here, here, here, here, here NASA here, here, here, here Nintendo and Virtual Boy here Palmer Luckey and Oculus Rift headsets here, here, here, here PTSD treatment here Rony Abovitz and Magic Leap here Samsung Gear VR here, here Sebastian Thrun here

Your Face Belongs to Us: A Secretive Startup's Quest to End Privacy as We Know It

by Kashmir Hill · 19 Sep 2023 · 487pp · 124,008 words

“drone technology,” with the caveat that it was “in development.” The company had established, it said, a “unique joint venture with Oculus Virtual Reality founder Palmer Luckey.” Luckey was a tech wunderkind who had sold his virtual reality startup to Facebook, but then was ousted from the company for funding a meme

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need more money to keep this operation going. Ton-That emailed two of the richest people that Johnson had introduced him to: Oculus Rift founder Palmer Luckey and billionaire investor Peter Thiel. “I got a prototype working,” he told Luckey, who was intrigued enough to ask for more information about it. That

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to Do with Trump,” Wall Street Journal, November 11, 2018. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT funding a meme-maker: Gideon Resnick and Ben Collins, “Palmer Luckey: The Facebook Near-Billionaire Secretly Funding Trump’s Meme Machine,” Daily Beast, September 22, 2016. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT he was working on

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8, 2017. Provided by Johnson, on file with author. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT “I got a prototype working”: Hoan Ton-That, email to Palmer Luckey and Charles Johnson, June 13, 2017. Provided by Johnson, on file with author. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT “It means we can find”: Hoan

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had no idea: Author’s interviews with Charles Johnson, 2021–2022. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT “officially closed money”: Hoan Ton-That, email to Palmer Luckey and Charles Johnson, August 14, 2017. Provided by Johnson, on file with author. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT nearly a year after: Clearview AI

The Contrarian: Peter Thiel and Silicon Valley's Pursuit of Power

by Max Chafkin · 14 Sep 2021 · 524pp · 130,909 words

the Rings name to boot—Andúril is Aragorn’s sword and means “flame of the West” in Elvish), had been founded by Trae Stephens and Palmer Luckey, a close friend of Johnson’s whose previous company, Oculus, had received money from Founders Fund and been sold to Facebook. The company, which a

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put Damore’s firing from Google into a broader context by pointing out two other prominent political disputes at Facebook. One was the firing of Palmer Luckey, the founder of Oculus, a virtual reality company that Zuckerberg had paid more than $2 billion to acquire two years earlier. Zuckerberg had dismissed Luckey

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had never looked better. Anduril, the startup built on the back of Trump’s promise to strengthen border security and founded by Johnson’s friend Palmer Luckey, raised $200 million in July, doubling its valuation to $2 billion. SpaceX became the first private company to send humans into orbit, successfully launching two

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2, 2019, https://mijente.net/2019/05/palantir-arresting-families/. advanced artificial intelligence: Steven Levy, “Inside Anduril, Palmer Luckey’s Bid to Build a Border Wall,” Wired, June 11, 2018, https://www.wired.com/story/palmer-luckey-anduril-border-wall/. posted the same message: Kari Paul, “Tech Workers Protest Data Mining Firm Palantir for

Gilded Rage: Elon Musk and the Radicalization of Silicon Valley

by Jacob Silverman · 9 Oct 2025 · 312pp · 103,645 words

big “prime” defense contractors. At first, the company said it wouldn’t build lethal weapons; that would change. One of Anduril’s co-founders was Palmer Luckey, who created the Oculus VR headset and sold the company to Facebook for $2 billion. Luckey was also one of the tech industry’s most

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, and drone warfare. The moral and strategic failures of the war on terror and the war in Iraq were object lessons in imperial hubris. For Palmer Luckey and his tech peers, they inspired business ideas. Another notable hawk raising his voice was Luckey’s Anduril co-founder Trae Stephens, who began his

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/microchips-us-taiwan-strategy/ 18 https://x.com/ElbridgeColby/status/1761514916224139737 19 https://x.com/ElbridgeColby/status/1654868358012051459 20 https://techcrunch.com/2024/10/01/palmer-luckey-every-country-needs-a-warrior-class-excited-to-enact-violence-on-others-in-pursuit-of-good-aims/?guccounter=1 21 https://theluddite.org/post/mark

Blank Space: A Cultural History of the Twenty-First Century

by W. David Marx · 18 Nov 2025 · 642pp · 142,332 words

Peter Thiel survived as a rare Trump supporter in Silicon Valley, with Zuckerberg defending his presence on Facebook’s board of directors as “ideological diversity.” Palmer Luckey, who sold his virtual reality hardware company Oculus to Facebook in 2014 for $2 billion, wasn’t as fortunate. Teaming up with deplorable Milo Yiannopoulos

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. Silicon Valley power players Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz endorsed him. The crypto world saw him as a guardian angel. Tech turned toward the right. Palmer Luckey—the Oculus founder once exiled from tech for supporting Trump in 2016—was no longer an outlier but instead reemerged as a sage-like “American

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/oculus-founder-funds-anti-hillary-932287. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT “impacting the perception”: Matt Kamen, “Palmer Luckey Distances Himself from Nimble America Group,” Wired, September 26, 2016, https://www.wired.com/story/palmer-luckey-apologises-nimble-america-oculus. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT leather bikini top: Ben Lang, “In First Interview

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Since Leaving Oculus, Founder Palmer Luckey Talks VR’s Mobile Future, Facebook, and Cosplay,” Road to VR, May 10, 2017

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, https://www.roadtovr.com/oculus-founder-palmer-luckey-first-interview-since-leaving-oculus-facebook. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT Academic Evgeny Morozov

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-republican-candidates-donations. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT sage-like “American Vulcan”: Jeremy Stern, “American Vulcan,” Tablet, https://www.tabletmag.com/feature/american-vulcan-palmer-luckey-anduril. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT “cultural anxiety”: Olivier Roy, The Crisis of Culture, trans. Cynthia Schoch and Trista Selous (Oxford University Press, 2023

Rigged: How the Media, Big Tech, and the Democrats Seized Our Elections

by Mollie Hemingway · 11 Oct 2021 · 595pp · 143,394 words

take place online. You could get no more dramatic illustration of how intolerant and hostile Silicon Valley was to Trump supporters than the story of Palmer Luckey—a true tech visionary who brought virtual reality to the masses as the founder of Oculus VR, the company that created the popular Oculus Rift

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://www.newsweek.com/donald-trump-keyboard-warriors-election-1504290. 37. Gideon Resnick and Ben Collins, “Palmer Luckey: The Facebook Near-Billionaire Secretly Funding Trump’s Meme Machine,” Daily Beast, September 22, 2016, https://www.thedailybeast.com/palmer-luckey-the-facebook-near-billionaire-secretly-funding-trumps-meme-machine. 38. Kirsten Grind and Keach Hagey, “Why

Places of the Heart: The Psychogeography of Everyday Life

by Colin Ellard · 14 May 2015 · 313pp · 92,053 words

facts of economics to make clear the seismic shift that is now beginning to take shape. In 2011, a precocious eighteen-year-old Californian named Palmer Luckey, frustrated with the lack of availability of good-quality head-worn displays for virtual reality, put together an ingenious set of inexpensive components, along with

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,” can be found in the journal Environment and Behavior (2012, Volume 46, Pages 507–529). 9An entertaining and informative description of the Palmer Luckey story by Taylor Clark titled “How Palmer Luckey Created Oculus Rift” can be found in the issue of Smithsonian Magazine (November, 2014). Available at: http://www.smithsonianmag.com/innovation/how

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-palmer-luckey-created-oculus-rift-180953049/?no-ist 10Much illuminating information about the video game industry can be found at the website of the Entertainment Software Rating