Palmer Luckey

I wasn't looking at what existing companies were doing in VR because clearly they were all doing it wrong.

Whatever they were doing was not working.

I was not gonna look around at the handful of VR companies that existed in that time and learn anything except how to fail.

So I wanted to look into the past.

What were people thinking when they were thinking bigger?

when they were willing to look at wackier paths, when they were willing to consider things that have been eliminated, often because technologies just weren't ready.

There's a lot of technologies that have been discarded because they weren't practical at the time and nobody ever revisited them and said, hey, I actually think the time has come.

A good example is with the Rift, doing real-time distortion correction

is not a new idea.

It existed in the 1980s and the 1990s in the virtual reality community.

It had been discarded even by NASA.

There's a fascinating NASA paper where they talk about doing real-time geometry distortion correction on a virtual reality headset that made the optics lower distortion and allowed them to therefore use wider field of view, lighter weight optics than would have otherwise been required to have an optically perfect image.

And the conclusion was, yeah, this is a really good way to save money and to save weight, but it's too computationally expensive.

We're using most of our processing power to warp the image in real time rather than render this wireframe image.

And so this is not a good approach.

You should just do it optically and then you don't have to have a more expensive computer.

But back then, compute was the expensive part.

And the optical transform used up a lot of your compute.

Nobody reexamined this idea even as computers got better.

Nobody went back until me and said, wait a sec,