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Palmer Luckey explains how he built the first Oculus VR headset at 16 years old

When Palmer was 15 years old, he realized that the future of video games was virtual reality:

“It’s the ability to feel like you’re literally inside of the video game… That’s clearly where this is all going someday. There’s disagreement as to when, but I don’t think anyone would be like, ‘No, gaming is never going to get there. Nobody wants it.’ That’s why it’s such a science fiction staple.”

So he tried building his own prototype headset. And the first thing he did was read. He read old patents from the 80s and 90s, academic studies, and military research papers:

“I was just downloading into my brain everything I could about what worked and what didn’t.”

He also bought a lot of old hardware:

“Back then old VR headsets were dirt cheap because nobody was collecting them. I was probably the only guy in the whole world collecting them. So I’m going on eBay, and I’m looking at all of this stuff being sold by like medical facilities shutting down that have some headset that was used as part of a research trial in the late 90s. I’m buying this stuff that they bought for literally hundreds of thousands of dollars for less than a hundred dollars… I’m taking it apart. I’m learning from it, realizing what worked and what didn’t”

At 16 years old, Palmer had his first prototype headset called the PR1. It was a huge helmet that weighed 6 or 7 pounds:

“It was so uncomfortable. So ungainly. But it was the first thing that proved this experience - the visual side is clearly way better than gaming on a monitor. And so I kept working on it, building new prototypes, and I did that for years… I wish I could say my friends were supportive but they weren’t. Every prototype that I had shown them up to this one that I made when I was 18 was honestly not very inspiring unless you had a really good imagination. You had to imagine where it was going.”

But when Palmer showed this latest prototype to his friends, they finally got it. It was then he decided to start the company that became Oculus. Two years later, he raised $2.4 million via a Kickstarter campaign. And two years after that, Oculus VR was acquired by Facebook for $2 billion.