June/July 2012
“I NEED TO UPDATE YOU ON SOME STUFF,” LUCKEY TYPED TO HIS TRUE-BLUE buddy Chris Dycus over Skype the day after his meeting with Iribe.
“What stuff?” Dycus asked, assuming it would probably be something related to their beloved online forum, ModRetro.
“Sony offered to hire me after E3,” Luckey said. “$140k salary.”
“Holy crap,” Dycus replied. Here he was, just a senior in high school—graduating in a few weeks and then taking community college classes in the fall—and his best friend—who was only one year older—was being offered the job of a lifetime.
“I turned them down,” Luckey said.
“What?! Why?!?!”
“I was going to go with them, but then I met these venture capitalists with crazy amounts of money. And they said that they would make sure I have money to start my own company . . .”
“Wow,” Dycus replied. “That is awesome.”
“Yeah. So skip college and come work with me.”
“You being serious?”
“Yes.
“I’m gonna need a few more details before I can decide something like that,” Dycus said. “Like: what would be my daily duties?”
“You would be helping me to fabricate prototype units, doing some slight design revision.”
“Will you be on the same level as me, for the most part? Doing similar things? I just don’t wanna feel alone, though I’m sure I’ll be fine no matter what.”
“I will be focusing more on the hardware design side,” Luckey replied. “Since I know VR like no other. But we will be working closely together. Even if you cannot stick around after the summer, I at least want to get you around for a couple of weeks.”
A couple of weeks? Sure, Dycus could commit to that. Building prototypes sounded like fun (and as an added bonus, it’d get his mom to stop bugging him about finding a summer job). But there was just one problem. “I still have no car,” Dycus reminded Luckey. “And my sexy, sexy legs aren’t quite toned enough to bike there.”
“After I get my first paycheck,” Luckey said, “I’m gonna use that money to move out. So you can stay with me for sure. At least until September. Sometime around early September, I am proposing to Nicole.”
“Oooh. Nice!”
“Anyway, let me know when you finish high school. The way things are going, it will probably ramp up in Mid-July. And if you like things, maybe you can ditch college. Unless your parents would kill you . . .”
“If I’m already enrolled and ditch, yeah, I’d be dead.”
Luckey understood. A few weeks earlier, he had told his parents that he was going to take some time off of school to start Oculus. They did not like this idea, and had even started threatening to sell his trailer. “But I am going to take a year off for this,” Luckey told Dycus. “If it succeeds, then I put it off more. If not, oh well, I will have had a lot of fun and made some money . . .”
TO CELEBRATE THE FOURTH OF JULY, LUCKEY WAS PLANNING TO TAKE EDELMANN someplace special for fireworks. But first he had business to attend to: demoing the Rift for Iribe, Mitchell, and Antonov at the Hilton Hotel in Long Beach.
By this point—as agreed to at BJ’s Pizza Grill—Iribe was already in. To what extent was still a question, but the size of his investment and how much business counsel he’d be able to provide would come down to a combination of how he felt about today’s demo and how many of his after-hours at Gaikai he wanted to devote to this Oculus thing. Mitchell, not having profited nearly as much as Iribe (or Antonov) from the Scaleform acquisition, wasn’t in a position to make a significant financial investment. But as had been the case throughout his life, Mitchell made up for whatever resources he lacked with an insatiable degree of effort and enthusiasm.
That’s why, even before any papers were signed, Mitchell had already devoted all his free time to figuring out how they could launch a Kickstarter campaign that would surpass any that had come before. In particular, he’d been racking his brain to try and figure out a way to destigmatize virtual reality for all the skeptics out there. And a lot of big-time skeptics were out there. In here, too, as Antonov didn’t yet know what to make of this VR start-up that Iribe was already using “we” to talk about.
That seemed impulsive to Antonov. But that had always been one of the big differences between him and Iribe. Whereas Antonov liked to learn everything he could first and then take a few weeks to vet his thoughts, Iribe had a particular way of deciding things quickly. He liked taking risks and had no problem jumping into things. So it didn’t really surprise Antonov that Iribe had already written Luckey that $3,700 check and agreed to pay for the production of a high-quality Kickstarter video. But what did surprise him was that Iribe had already started to plant the seed that they should leave Gaikai and go run Oculus. Come on, Antonov had replied each time Iribe brought it up. Let’s at least see the device first!
“There he is!” Iribe exclaimed, as Luckey ambled into the lobby, carrying a white bucket filled to the brim with electronics.
“Okay,” Antonov said, grinning at the sight of Luckey and his bucket. “This is certainly a start-up!”
“Shall we get started?” Iribe asked, slinging his arm over Luckey’s shoulder.
“Yes,” Luckey replied. He booted up his laptop, fiddled with a bunch of wires, and then connected them to his headset, which, without a head strap, was more like a lightweight, gold-bar-shaped, foam-core viewfinder. When Luckey had the setup ready to go, he asked Iribe to turn off the lights.
“What are you gonna show us?” Mitchell asked.
“It’s a testbed that Carmack made. But I won’t spoil it,” Luckey explained. “Who wants to go first?”
“Mike,” Iribe suggested. “Mike, Mike, Mike. You first.”
Antonov pressed the prototype up to his eyes and quietly experienced his first fifteen seconds in virtual reality. “Uh, I kind of get it,” Antonov said, removing the device.
Iribe and Mitchell quickly glanced at each other with pale looks on their faces.
“It’s pretty neat,” Antonov continued. “But it’s a little bit blurry.”
“Oh!” Iribe exclaimed. “I think you need your glasses, Mike.”
Lying there, beside the bucket, were Antonov’s glasses. He forgot he had taken them off. So Mitchell picked them up, passed them over, and Antonov tried again. And this time, it didn’t take him fifteen seconds to react. “Ohhhhh wow!” Antonov shouted. He was looking at a colorful room with pipes. There was a remarkable sense of depth. It really, really looked 3-D! And as he turned left to right, up and down, and then back and forth again, everything was in the right spot. “This is very compelling!”
Mitchell tried it next. And, oh boy, compelling was an understatement. This was . . . magical, mesmerizing, momentous. It was like he was there—actually there!—like he had been zapped inside of a video game. Then, as if that weren’t already enough, Mitchell saw something else that got his heart racing: opportunity. For years, Mitchell had wanted to start a business of his own. Scaleform, with its entrepreneurial spirit, had scratched that itch a little. Gaikai, too. But in both cases, Mitchell felt like he was late to the party. For once, he wanted to be there from the beginning, to start a start-up. With Luckey’s invention, he saw a chance to make that happen.
Finally, Iribe received the prototype and held it up to his eyes. From the very first moment he peered into the device, the hair on the back of his neck stood up. A hundred years from now, Iribe thought, we’ll all have virtual reality goggles like these. “Wow,” he said, in disbelief. “So let me ask you: How much of this is yours—like, your invention—versus stuff that Carmack did?”
“Oh,” Luckey said proudly. “It’s all mine. I mean, the testbed you just tried was made by John. I can’t take any credit for that. But the actual HMD? That’s my prototype.”
Iribe, Mitchell, and Antonov smiled at Luckey’s ingenuity.
“The only hardware that John ‘added’ was an IMU,” Luckey said, referring to an “inertial measurement unit,” which is small, sensor-filled chip used to track the orientation and rotation of an object in space. “But I say it like that—like ‘added’—because the only reason I didn’t send him an IMU was because he didn’t need one. He was already using a Hillcrest FSRK-USB-2 for his experiments with the HMZ, the Z800, and all those other HMDs.”1
“Can you say again the name of this IMU?” Antonov asked.
“FSRK-USB-2,” Luckey answered. “Actually, it’s a slightly modified version of the FSRK-USB-2 that Carmack was able to get because, well, he’s Carmack. So this one, it’s a 125 Hz tracker, but he got Hillcrest—the company that makes it—to make custom firmware so it runs at 250 Hz. I don’t know how much they’d charge us, but the trackers cost about a hundred bucks and do pretty solid 3DOF tracking.”
With three blank stares now looking back at him, Luckey realized that this required some additional explanation. “Sorry!” he apologized. “So DOF is short for degrees of freedom. Which refers to the types of movements you can do in your virtual environment. Probably the simplest way to put it, at least for now, is that there there’s 3DOF and 6DOF. And the more DOF the better, okay? With 3DOF, you can track head movement; so, you know, you can turn your head left or right and look around in the virtual world. But that’s all you can do—meaning you can’t move around. To be able to move around (or even just lean forward) you need 6DOF. That’ll give you “positional tracking” so that you can actually walk around the virtual world. Basically,” Luckey ended by saying “we want 6DOF, but we need 3DOF. Because without head tracking, your HMD is pretty much just a giant TV that’s really, really close to your face!”
The guys laughed.
“Not totally,” Luckey added, “because you could still display stereoscopic images that are the same size and scale of the real world. But you get the idea . . .”
“Totally,” Iribe said, still laughing. “I think it’s fair to say we need head tracking! And, wait, how much did you say that Hillcrest tracker cost? A hundred bucks?”
“Yeah,” Luckey replied. “That’s the retail cost, at least. But I have no idea how much we’d be able to get it for if we buy them in bulk.”
“And if we wanted to go with a different option, are there other tracking devices that are good? Other ones that you’ve worked with?”
“Definitely. I’ve worked with a lot. I’ve worked with Polhemus magnetic trackers and Virtual I-O inertial trackers from the old days. And I’ve worked with more recent hardware like the Spacepoint Fusion, PhaseSpace, and Razer Hydra.”
This gave Iribe a thought. “Could we make our own?”
“Sure,” Luckey nodded. “It would take some time, obviously. But it’s not unreasonable. In fact, a friend of mine on MTBS3D is working on an open-source tracker. He sent me one of his prototypes and I was even thinking about including that with my Kickstarter kits. Well, before I met you guys and the scope changed a bit.”
“Go big or go home!” Iribe said.
“So,” Luckey said, pointing to his prototype. “Does it live up to the hype?”
“Guys . . .” Iribe said, but he didn’t finish the sentence right away. He couldn’t. His mind was bursting with grand and jagged thoughts. He bought himself a few seconds by walking across the room to turn the lights back on. “Guys,” he said again, “do you have any idea how huge this is going to be?”
“I see many challenges,” Antonov said. “But it is very compelling. And if it is compelling, then it is worth doing.”
“Oh man,” Mitchell said, still in a sort of what-just-happened daze. “I cannot even begin to express how thrilled I am to take this thing to the next level.”
“Agreed,” Iribe said. “Let’s go build a company that changes the world.”
“I’M SO HAPPY FOR YOU!” LUCKEY’S GIRLFRIEND, NICOLE EDELMANN, SAID later that night, as the two of them gazed upward from the beach—watching fireworks set off from aboard the Queen Mary. Pop—pop-pop-pop—and bursts of red, white, and blue electrified the sky. “So what happens next?”
“So much,” Luckey replied, his eyes glowing with patriotism. “But the number one thing for right now is to ramp up for the Kickstarter campaign. We’re going to launch it on August 1.”
“That’s so soon!”
“I know. But Brendan’s not worried. He thinks we can pull it off.”
“You trust him,” Edelmann said. The way she said it sounded almost like a question, but before Luckey replied he realized that it wasn’t at all. Instead, it was his girlfriend—the love of his life, the one who knows him best of all—noticing that the way he talked about Brendan had changed. Any anxiety he’d had about working with him was gone.
“Yeah,” Luckey replied. “I do trust him. I mean, he’s still a suit. But other than that, he’s a good guy. And I think he’d make a good CEO.”
“You don’t want to be CEO?” Edelmann asked.
Although it was a little hard to admit aloud, Luckey knew that Oculus’s best chance to succeed didn’t involve him running the company. If push came to shove, he felt he could handle it. Largely because that same grandpa who had taught him that “Money is freedom and freedom is happiness” had also instilled the importance of responsibility and financial accountability. But managing one’s own finances was very different from managing an entire company. And while he was tempted to find out how different—by following in the footsteps of famous hackers-turned-tech-moguls like Steve Jobs, Larry Page, and Mark Zuckerberg—he didn’t want to let ego guide his decision making. “I realize that the thing to do is to try and be the God, emperor, and CEO of everything,” Luckey told Edelmann. “But running a company is not my aspiration. There’s a lot of operational aspects to running a company that I don’t want to be in charge of—like I do not want to be in charge of making sure everyone gets paid on time. And that the bills are all paid. So if Brendan (or somebody else) could do that—make sure shit gets done on time, the bills are all paid—then that means I get to spend time working on what I actually want to do: work on VR.”
From what little time Luckey had spent with Iribe, Luckey could already tell that he was well-organized, good at managing relationships and had a talent for generating enthusiasm. And though Luckey would often give him a hard time for being a “Suit,” he knew that Iribe wasn’t a typical Suit. For one thing: Iribe didn’t actually wear a suit. For another thing: Iribe actually seemed like an honest and caring individual.
That said, Luckey was smart enough to acknowledge the possibility this was all an act. That, at his core, maybe Iribe wasn’t actually any of those things. But, even if that were the case, Luckey reasoned that if Iribe was a good enough actor to trick him, then he’s probably good enough to trick others.
“I think he’d be a great CEO for Oculus,” Luckey explained. “But he just got to Gaikai. And he has his friends there. Although I kind of get the sense that they’re not happy. But who knows?”
As the fireworks grew even bigger and louder, Luckey put aside his thoughts about Oculus. No point in thinking about virtual reality when the one you’ve got in front of you is so damn good. And it was. She was. All of it was.
God bless America, Luckey thought. God bless this wonderful country of ours.