Even better, for Facebook’s purposes, virtual reality could allow users to share entire immersive experiences, rather than just photos. “Imagine enjoying a court-side seat at a game, studying in a classroom of students and teachers all over the world or consulting with a doctor face-to-face-just by putting on goggles in your home,” he wrote at the time. In the Rift, Zuckerberg saw something far grander than a mere entertainment device. This past March, Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg stopped by the Oculus offices for a demonstration and, according to Fortune magazine, immediately pronounced the Rift “one of the coolest things I’ve ever seen.” Within weeks, Facebook bought the company for $2 billion.

They would not be the last investors moved to rapture by Luckey’s invention. And we all looked at each other like, Oh, my God.” “I was the last to try it,” recalled Iribe, who is now the CEO of Oculus VR, the company they founded. After his turn, Mitchell offered the same monosyllabic response. As Luckey cheerfully struggled to get this jumble into working order, Iribe was all but holding his breath.įinally, Luckey handed the headset to Antonov, who pressed it to his eyes and, slowly, began to bob his head around, exploring a three-dimensional digital space. Their grinning 19-year-old business partner wasn’t holding a slick-looking prototype he was lugging in a tray tangled over with a mess of cables.įrom underneath this thicket, Luckey dug out a crudely fashioned electronics box, apparently the headset: a tape-covered black brick with wires poking out from every angle. When Luckey finally bounded into the room, clad in T-shirt, shorts and flip-flops, Iribe’s unease about the risk they’d taken escalated. “Palmer described the Rift in such a compelling way that we wanted to do it without even seeing it,” Iribe explained.

And therein lay the source of their anxiety: Not only were they walking away from a lot of money, the three were gambling on a product they had never actually tried themselves. Because this new venture conflicted with a deal they’d made with another tech company, partnering with Luckey meant potentially forfeiting millions of dollars. Just days before, the three video game industry veterans had agreed to found a company with Luckey to develop a device he called the Oculus Rift, a virtual reality headset that had been lauded as revolutionary by nearly everyone who had tested it. Luckey was late-very late, in fact-but that wasn’t the only thing making them edgy. On the afternoon of July 4, 2012, Brendan Iribe, Nate Mitchell and Michael Antonov sat in a room at the Long Beach Hilton, nervously waiting for Palmer Luckey.

Oculus rift software