Oculus Rift

» see oculus.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the goodbye ~

The first Rift was built in a garage in Long Beach in 2011 by an eighteen-year-old collecting old head-mounted displays as a hobby. Palmer Luckey's insight was not optical, it was economic: the phone industry had spent five years making small high-density screens cheap, and nobody had thought to put one of those in front of somebody's eyes with a wide lens and a fast tracker. John Carmack got hold of a duct-taped prototype and demonstrated it at E3 in 2012, which is what turned a hobby project into a company.

The Kickstarter opened on 1 August 2012 asking for $250,000 and closed with roughly $2.4 million from about 9,500 backers. Development Kit 1 shipped in March 2013 at $300 with a screen so low-resolution that everyone described the experience in terms of the pixel grid, and it did not matter, because the head tracking worked and nothing before it had. DK2 followed in July 2014 with positional tracking. The consumer unit, the one people mean when they say Rift, went on pre-order on 6 January 2016 at $599 and started arriving on 28 March.

It was never a standalone device. The Rift was a display and a sensor package on the end of a cable, and the actual computer was a tower under the desk that had to meet a specification Oculus published and most machines failed. Add the headset, the PC and the two desk sensors together and consumer VR in 2016 cost about as much as a used car in some markets. That is the constraint every part of this story runs into, and it is what Facebook eventually gave up on rather than solved.

I did not buy one. A $599 headset that needs a several-thousand-lira machine behind it arrives in Turkey with import duty stacked on an exchange rate that was already moving the wrong way, which puts it well outside the range of a curiosity purchase. What I did have was a professional reason to read every teardown. Tracking a rigid body in six degrees of freedom with low latency is close to my day job in a different application, and Constellation was the cleanest consumer version of it anyone had shipped: infrared LEDs blinking in a known pattern on the shell and a camera on the desk watching them, which was enough to recover a pose fast enough that your inner ear never filed a complaint.

~ the chronicle ~

~ the tracking problem ~

Everything difficult about VR in 2016 was latency. If the picture lags your head by more than a handful of milliseconds your body concludes it has been poisoned, and the industry had already learned this the hard way in the nineties. Oculus solved it outside-in. The headset carried a constellation of infrared emitters under its fabric and a small camera on a stand watched them blink. The geometry was known well enough that a pose could be recovered every frame. Add a second sensor and you could stand up and turn around.

The cost of that answer was the room. You had to place the sensors and run USB out to them, then accept that the whole rig lived permanently on one desk with a clear floor in front of it. Valve went the other way with base stations that swept the room with lasers, which tracked better and cost more. Both approaches were obsolete within three years, because inside-out tracking got good enough to run cameras on the headset itself and throw away everything else. The Rift S did exactly that in 2019, which was both an improvement and, in hindsight, the beginning of the argument that the PC was unnecessary too.

~ the two billion ~

Facebook announced it was buying Oculus VR on 25 March 2014 for around $2 billion. The backers who had funded the Kickstarter took it badly and said so at length, on the reasonable grounds that they had paid to create an independent hardware company and had instead capitalized an acquisition target for an advertising business. Markus Persson cancelled a planned Minecraft port the same week and explained why in public. None of it changed anything, and the money did buy years of hardware development that nobody else was funding.

The other legal shadow over the product was ZeniMax, which sued on the argument that Carmack had developed relevant work while employed at id Software and taken it with him. A Dallas jury found in February 2017 that no trade secrets had been stolen but that a non-disclosure agreement had been broken, and awarded $500 million. A judge cut that to $250 million in 2018 and the parties settled at the end of that year. It is a strange footnote for a product whose entire origin story is a teenager in a garage.

~ the day it stopped being a pc product ~

The Quest arrived in May 2019 with the computer inside the headset. It was weaker than a tower and it did not matter, because you could hand it to somebody who had never used VR without first explaining what a USB 3 port was. Oculus then shipped Link later that year, a feature that let a Quest borrow a PC over a cable when it wanted to, which quietly removed the last reason to own a Rift.

Facebook made it official in September 2020: Rift S sales would end in 2021 and there would be no more PC-only headsets. The Rift S left the store in April 2021. In late 2021 the company announced the Oculus brand would be retired along with the Facebook name, and through 2022 the Quest lost the Oculus prefix and oculus.com stopped resolving to anything of its own. A product line, a company name and a website, all cleared inside about eighteen months.

~ what remains ~

PC virtual reality still exists and it mostly runs on hardware descended from the thing that replaced the Rift, plugged back into a computer by software. That is a peculiar ending. The tethered headset did not lose to a better tethered headset, it lost to a device that could pretend to be one on demand, and the pretending turned out to be good enough for almost everybody.

What the Rift actually left is the assumption. Before 2016 the reasonable position was that consumer VR had been tried in 1995 and had failed on physics, and after 2016 it was obvious that the hardware could be built and the open question was whether anyone wanted it. Ten years on that question is still open, which is not the Rift's fault. It answered the part it was asked.

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