This is the first of 44 interviews that I conducted at the Silicon Valley Virtual Reality Conference & Expo. I was able to capture over 11.5 hours worth of material from 3/4 of the speakers, 2/3 of the exhibitors and 11% of all attendees, and I’ll be doing a daily podcast over the next month and a half (and maybe beyond). A full list of interviewees is listed down below.
Palmer Luckey is the founder of Oculus VR, and I had an opportunity to conduct a brief interview with him. I noticed that Palmer’s bio mentions that he founded the ModRetro Forums, and it turns out that there’s some interesting connections between ModRetro and the founding of Oculus VR.
He talks about some of his first and forgettable VR experiences, and the process of starting what he claims is the world’s largest private VR HMD collection. He also covers his connection to the /r/oculus reddit community, the reaction to the Facebook acquisition announcement on Reddit, as well as what he sees as what the future of VR.
Reddit Discussion here. And be sure to check out the Rev VR Ubercast featuring an in-depth discussion with Palmer here.
Topics
- 0:00 – What led to founding the ModRetro forums & how has the console modding scene evolved?
- 2:29 – How did VR evolve out of being involved with the console modding scene?
- 3:38 – What do you remember about your first VR experience?
- 4:20 – When did you start your VR HMD collection and what were some of the first VR headsets that you got?
- 4:56 – Did you end up fixing a lot of these VR HMDs?
- 5:17 – What have been some of your favorite VR experiences?
- 5:47 – How often do you read the Oculus subreddit community?
- 6:25 – How did you react to the Reddit community’s downvoting and skepticism of the Facebook acquisition?
- 7:14 – What were some of your takeaways from the panel about the next five years of VR?
- 8:11 – What has been your experience of this first consumer VR conference & what it means?
Full list of interviews from the 1st Silicon Valley Virtual Reality Conference
- Aaron Davies, Head of Developer Relations at Oculus VR
- Aaron Lemke, Unello Design founder & Eden River game
- Amir Rubin, Sixense Entertainment CEO
- Ben Lang, Road to VR founder & executive editor
- Bernhard Drax, Draxtor.com Second Life documentarian
- Blair Renaud, IRIS VR Co-Founder & Lead Designer of Technolust
- Caitlyn Meeks, Unity Asset Store Manager
- Cosmo Scharf, Founder of VRLA
- Cris Miranda, EnterVR podcast
- “Cymatic” Bruce Wooden, VR evangelist
- David Holz, Leap Motion CTO and Co-founder
- Denny Unger, Cloudhead Games President & Creative Director of “The Gallery: Six Elements” game
- Ebbe Altberg, Linden Lab CEO (Second Life)
- Edward Mason, GameFace Labs Founder and CEO
- Eric Greenbaum, Jema VR Founder
- George Burger, Infinadeck founder
- James Blaha, Diplopia game for lazy eye
- Jan Goetgeluk, Virtuix CEO & developer of the Virtuix Omni
- Jesse Joudrey, Jespionage Entertainment founder & creator of VRChat
- John Murray, Seebright founder & CEO
- Josh Farkas, Cubicle Ninjas CEO
- Matt Bell, Matterport founder & CEO
- Matt “Stompz” Carrell, Stompz founder & co-host of PodVR podcast
- Max Geiger, producer at Wemo Lab
- Mike Sutherland, PrioVR & VP of technology at YEI Technology
- Nathan Burba, Survios CEO
- Nick Lebesis, Network Flo
- Nonny de la Peña, Immersive Journalism founder & Annenberg Fellow at USC School of Cinematic Arts
- OlivierJT, Synthesis Universe creator
- Palmer Luckey, Oculus VR Founder
- Paul Mylyniec, MakeVR Head of Development at Sixense Entertainment
- Peter Sassaman, Gauntl33t Project Haptic Feedback Glove
- Philip Rosedale, Founder of High Fidelity & Second Life
- Reverend Kyle Riesenbeck, Rev VR Podcast & Road to VR contributor
- Scott Phillips, VR Walker Project
- Sean Edwards, Director of Development Lucid VR & Shovsoft & Lunar Flight & ZVR
- Simon Solotko, All Future Parties Founder
- Stefan Pernar, Virtual Reality Ventures founder & Virtual Reality Fashion project
- Stefano Corazza, Mixamo CEO & Co-founder
- Tony Davidson, Innervision VR & Ethereon game
- Tony Parisi, Vizi Founder, & co-creator of the VRML & co-chair of the San Francisco WebGL Meetup
- Vladimir Vukicevic, Gaming director at Mozilla & inventor of WebGL
- Walter Greenleaf, Stanford University, MediaX Program & medical applications of VR
- William Provancher, Tactical Haptics founder & Reactive Grip™ touch feedback
Theme music: “Fatality” by Tigoolio
Rough Transcript
[00:00:05.452] Kent Bye: The Voices of VR Podcast. All right, so why don't you just introduce yourself and tell me how you founded Mod Retro Forums. What led to that?
[00:00:20.443] Palmer Luckey: My name is Palmer Luckey, I'm the founder of Oculus, designer of the Rift, and yes, founder of the Mod Retro Forums. So, one of my hobbies prior to this was portable-izing, which is the art of turning mostly vintage game consoles into self-contained portable units with built-in control screens, batteries, all that. And it's a lot of fun because it's about taking old technology and then cutting out the old parts, replacing them with new parts and making it into something that was never possible before. And a lot of those skills ended up being really useful when I got into virtual reality. I started the Mod Retro Forums. There was another community where a lot of this stuff was going on. Some people were unhappy, you know, just usual teenager internet angst bullshit. And so we said, well, we're going to make our own website with blackjack and hookers, and it's going to be way better. And we did. And usually those kinds of things don't work, but it kind of did work. And so we ended up having thousands of members at our peak. We were on all the tech blogs at least a couple times a month. They were projects people posted, not Mod Retro itself. Mod Retro is just a shell of a forum. It's really all about the people and their projects. And we were doing between 5 and 8 million page views a month, which was pretty awesome. Things have kind of dwindled. The whole portable-izing scene has gone a little downhill. The console modding scene is... People would say it's gotten bigger, but I would argue it's gone downhill as well. It's just a very different group of people with a different set of goals. It's all about pirating games, not playing games. And it's all about, you know, making existing things better, not doing entirely new things with old technology. But, you know, that's me being a purist. And actually the Mod Retro Forums A lot of the moderators and staff members I ended up hiring near the start of Oculus and then even continuing as Oculus got bigger and bigger because we've been working on the same kinds of projects for years. We have all kinds of skills relevant to prototyping and hacking video devices. So, I love Mod Retro, man.
[00:02:15.018] Kent Bye: And so, what was your first...
[00:02:17.606] Palmer Luckey: Nobody ever asks about Mod Retro. It's funny, I even, I put it in my bio on the website and nobody ever asks. It's like, you know, like, even aside from this whole Oculus thing, I'm pretty proud of Mod Retro. Like, I think it was a very cool thing. It was the right thing at the right time.
[00:02:29.918] Kent Bye: Well, it sounds like it's part of the Oculus history, too, that people may not know, and so I'm curious, like, where did the virtual reality start kind of weaving in with that, then?
[00:02:39.568] Palmer Luckey: You know, it's funny, actually. Some of my really early VR headsets shared hardware from my portable-izing projects. Like, the screens that I end up using in the Rift, I have used in other projects like a wireless video control interface and portable Dreamcast. So it's kind of interesting how much overlap there was between those two technologies and certainly between building those two types of things. Like the first head-mounted display that I built, the PR-1, it eventually ended up using, later I upgraded it to use the same display as the Rift, but originally it was actually using a 5-inch sharp display that was originally designed to be clipped onto a PlayStation 1. It was this terrible QVGA res panel, but that was the first thing I did when I upgraded my... The PR-1 was a modified Liquid Image MRG 2.2, and that sharp display was a big upgrade. And then later I moved on to the BOE display that I used for the Rift. But yeah, even very early on there was a lot of sharing between my projects there and my VR projects, and a lot of the same people giving input, so it's kind of cool how it all worked out.
[00:03:38.981] Kent Bye: And so how old were you when you experienced your first virtual reality head-mounted display experience?
[00:03:44.529] Palmer Luckey: I don't remember. I don't remember because it was so uninteresting. It was one of those many, you know, video glasses things that you plug into an iPhone or an iPod. And yeah, this was even pre-iPhone. So you plug it into like your iPod video and you're like, wow, I'm watching video on a pair of glasses. And that was when I realized, oh man, these things aren't cool at all. But I wanted them to be cool. You know, I had seen plenty of science fiction. I knew that virtual reality had a lot of promise and that if someone could pull it off, and make a really immersive device that it would change a lot of things. But it wasn't until years later, years after I ever tried VR, that I actually started doing anything about it.
[00:04:21.190] Kent Bye: I see. And you claim to be the largest private owner of high mana displays. And I'm just curious, when did you start your collection and what were some of the first ones that you got?
[00:04:30.497] Palmer Luckey: I started my collection in 2009. One of the first ones was a Vuzix VR-920, an Imagine Z800, what else? A Rockwell Collins, ProView 30 and ProView 50, a HeadPlay, MyView Crystal. I got a bunch of different things and I just started buying more and more and more and more. And now I have more than 60 unique units. I don't know what the exact count is right now.
[00:04:56.184] Kent Bye: Wow, and so were these broken and then you would fix them?
[00:04:59.018] Palmer Luckey: A lot of them were working, a lot were broken, and I would fix them. Some of them, they're not even broken, they're working, it's just that they use very outdated video formats. Like, some of these things are meant to be plugged directly into old SGI Onyx workstations, and there's no easy way to properly drive them with modern hardware. So they're not broken, they're just obsolete.
[00:05:18.016] Kent Bye: I see, and I'm curious, what's your favorite VR experience that you've had recently in the Rift?
[00:05:23.918] Palmer Luckey: So I try a lot of things that are not necessarily public, and I also try a lot of things that are public. And I've been trying to avoid acting as a kingmaker in the VR space, especially because if I only talk about public ones, then all of a sudden there's a heavy bias towards things that rush towards pushing out anything, rather than waiting and polishing before they're putting out. So I'm trying to avoid pushing things in the wrong direction.
[00:05:47.875] Kent Bye: Fair enough. And I'm curious, how often do you check the Oculus subreddit community?
[00:05:52.607] Palmer Luckey: Pretty often. I mean, it depends on the days. Some days it's just too busy to ever check, but most days I at least give a peek in. And it's nice because on our developer forums, you can read through our developer forums, but there's just so many topics, so many posts, and they're all just rapidly. Getting larger and larger and larger. It's very hard to keep up whereas reddit you can go back and say okay What's been posted like in the last day?
[00:06:16.378] Kent Bye: You know see what the most important things are that you have to keep up on And not have to go through every single post every single comment to know what's happening And what was your experience on the day of the Facebook acquisition because it must have been bittersweet The reaction they were getting from the community seemed to be a lot of downvoting and skepticism But I'm just curious how you experienced that
[00:06:39.340] Palmer Luckey: Everyone was wrong, but I didn't blame them. You know, if I'd known what they knew and not known everything behind the scenes, some of which is now public and some of which is still private, I probably would have thought a lot of the same things. It kind of bummed me out that people couldn't, you know, see why this was a good thing. But at the same time, like I said, there's a lot of stuff that isn't necessarily public that absolutely had me convinced. And so I've been telling people just watch and see what happens. If bad things actually start happening, then you know, call us out on it. But thus far, there's only good things that are going to result from this.
[00:07:14.147] Kent Bye: Cool. So you're just on the panel the next five years of VR. What were some of the big points that stuck out for you that were made during that discussion?
[00:07:22.593] Palmer Luckey: Big points. I really liked talking about how, you know, this isn't a VR bubble. This is just the beginning of when virtual reality is finally going to work. And if virtual reality takes off, then the kinds of investments we're seeing right now are going to seem like nothing. I mean, look at how much investment is being put into mobile companies or companies that base a lot of their value off of mobile technologies. And look at where mobile technologies were less than 10 years ago. They were nothing. It was an unimportant market. mobile application company was ever going to achieve multi-hundred million or multi-billion valuations, you know, with a Palm Pilot app or with a Windows mobile app or, you know, something like that. I think that VR is going to be the same way. It's going to take off and there's going to be a lot more investment than there is now. And what we're seeing today is just the very beginning.
[00:08:11.512] Kent Bye: And finally, being here at the first ever Silicon Valley virtual reality conference and expo, maybe you could just talk about, you know, what your experience of this gathering is and what it means.
[00:08:22.175] Palmer Luckey: I arrived here 10 minutes before my panel and I've been talking to people ever since. So I don't know yet. It's been a plus so far, but I haven't seen any of the exhibits or seen any of the other panels or talks, but I'm going to assume it's going to be good. And so by the time people are actually listening to this podcast, I'm sure that I'll have tried a lot of different demos and heard a lot of different talks, and I'm sure it will be great.
[00:08:42.634] Kent Bye: Great. Well, thank you.
[00:08:44.018] Palmer Luckey: Thank you very much. It's been a pleasure.