TITLE
Why Virtual Reality Is About to Change the World
AUTHOR
Joel Stein
PUBLICATION
Time
YEAR
2015
ARTICLE TYPE
Article
FROM THE ARTICLE
Palmer Luckey isn’t like other Silicon Valley nerds.He’s a nerd all right, but not the kind who went to a top-ranked university, wrote brilliant code or studied business plans. He’s cheery and talks in normal sentences that are easy to understand. He was homeschooled, and though he did drop out of college, it was California State University, Long Beach, where he was majoring not in computer science but in journalism. He prefers shorts, and his feet are black because he doesn’t like wearing shoes, even outdoors. He doesn’t look like a guy who played Dungeons & Dragons so much as a character in Dungeons & Dragons. He’s a nerd from a different century, working on the problems of a different century. Palmer Luckey is a tinkerer.
If he had been one of those kids obsessed with Matchbox cars, we might have a flying car by now. But he was into video games and 1990s-era science fiction, so this year we will have virtual reality. As an 18-year-old who took apart smartphones and fixed them for cash, he figured out that the solutions to the problems virtual-reality engineers weren’t able to solve were right inside his phone. Now 22, Luckey sold his company, Oculus VR, to Facebook last year for $2.3 billion, allowing it to grow to more than 350 employees in offices in Silicon Valley, Seattle, Dallas and Austin as well as in South Korea and Japan. That’s because, as fantastical as Luckey’s dreams were–I want to feel like I’m really running down halls shooting bad guys!–Mark Zuckerberg and the rest of the tech industry had a much bigger hope for the sensory-immersion goggles Luckey used to carry around in a yellow bucket in order to hold loose wires. They had seen the Internet get disrupted by mobile and were wary of being blindsided by the next platform for accessing information–which they thought might be hiding in Luckey’s yellow bucket.
[…]
Virtual reality has been promised for decades, but in my conversations with the top developers in the field, it quickly became clear that never before have so much money and talent bet on its imminent arrival. Headsets will start going on sale this year, and competition will increase dramatically through 2016. At first they’ll be bought by hardcore gamers and gadget geeks. They’ll be expensive–as much as $1,500 with all the accoutrements. And just as with cell phones, everyone else will mock the early adopters for mindlessly embracing unnecessary technology with no useful purpose. At first.
COMPANIES MENTIONED
Facebook
Microsoft
Oculus
Valve
PEOPLE MENTIONED
Jeremy Bailenson
Jeep Barnett
Gil Baron
Clay Bavor
Ken Birdwell
Mark Bolas
Brendan Iribe
Alex Kipman
Felix Lajeunesse
Jaron Lanier
Palmer Luckey
Richard Marks
Paul Raphael
Xavier Palomer Ripoll
Mike Rothenberg
PLATFORMS MENTIONED
HTC Vive
Oculus Rift
PlayStation 4 [PS4]