While on a livestream with hundreds redditors from /r/oculus, I bump into non-other than Oculus Rift Founder, Palmer Luckey. Even though he is on his way out to the airport, he is gracious enough to grant me an interview if I can “walk-and-talk” with him.
With no PR agents or handlers around, as we wind our way through the maze of display booths and crowds, Palmer gives me a very candid and genuine view into his insights on the release and adoption stages of VR. Days earlier and to great fanfare, preslaes for the Oculus Rift had begun. While demand was great, among early adopters there was some controversy regarding the price.
Watch the interview to see how Palmer responds to this criticism and lays out his vision for how the technology will likely evolve. I believe this is his only interview where he makes the comparison to Telsa and how Elon planned to bring electric cars to the masses:
“Luckey: For this entire generation.
I think something similar to this is what Elon Musk has done with Tesla. His goal has always been to bring electric cars to the masses; that’s always been the goal. But the first car they made wasn’t the best, cheap electric car they could have made several years ago.
They needed to build the car that showed that electric cars were good before they could make that cheap car, and the technology just wasn’t there at that time to make that electric car for the masses that just wasn’t totally shitty. In a way, we’re following the same strategy.
We’re making something to convince people that virtual reality is actually the future, and I feel like we’re in a unique position to do that. Those guys that are at the lower end, they’re not going to provide the VR experience for everyone to aspire to.
Give it a few years. The Oculus Rift is going to cost next to nothing and run on far more PCs.”
Eric Matzner: Okay, so to begin, how has CES been?
Luckey: It has been a good CES so far. We’re selling tons and tons of rifts. We’re showing rift to tons and tons of people and having lots of fun with the people who are in the VR space—there are a lot more than there were a couple of years ago.
Matzner: Yeah, I met you here three years ago, and it has changed so much.
Luckey: Yeah, there was nobody.”
Matzner: So what was the most unexpected thing from the launch?
Luckey: The most unexpected thing from the launch? We got an unexpectedly high number of preorders, which I apologize to people for. I know that people say, “but didn’t you know that there would be a demand? Didn’t you know that everyone was going to want to buy?”
And we did. But…
Matzner: So what does that mean, exactly?
Luckey: The website was having issues, and there were issues with payments, but everything is fixed now, and the website is running fine [Editor’s note: Two of Futurism’s staff members were trying to buy the Oculus as soon as it went on sale, and the site was unable to accept payment. It caused much frustration and swearing in the office.]
Matzner:: Can you give us anything on how many you sold?
Luckey: I’m not going to disclose, and it’s not because I am an asshole. It’s because there are all kinds of financial disclosure, legal related reasons.
Matzner: Right. Well, we know that you made a decision here to choose quality over price…
Luckey: Correct. Things are different than they were a few years ago. There’s lots of people in the VR market. We were able to partner with Samsung to launch Gear VR, and we’re going to keep working with Samsung to launch other products in the future. But I’d say a lot of people…it’s not that we decided to prioritize a different part of the market, because we are doing the same thing—which is trying to bring virtual reality to everybody, but you have to do that at a certain level of quality.
And when I started this company, I thought that you could get this level of quality for $300.
As we did more research (laughs), we found out what we were really in for.
Matzner: And what was that, exactly?
Luckey: It became clear that the minimum quality that it took to make sure that people didn’t get uncomfortable, to make sure that you could induce a state of presence…it was higher than we initially thought.
That doesn’t mean that we don’t want to bring virtual reality to the masses. It’s just the first step of bringing high quality virtual reality.
Matzner: So you were concerned about disappointing people with a cheaper, but lower quality, virtual reality experience?
Luckey: So it’s not just about disappointing our customers, which is bad enough. It is about disappointing everybody…have them try this thing and say, “oh, I tried VR, and it isn’t all that great.”
The reality is, we could have made a headset that wasn’t nearly as good and saved one or two hundred dollars. We could have shipped something for $400, but it wouldn’t have been nearly as good.
And the thing is, people still would have needed an extremely high-end PC. For the average person, not like, gaming enthusiasts, it’s an all in investment for $1,500 going down to $1,300. It’s just not that big.
Matzner: So it’s just not that big of a deal, in the end?
Luckey: It’s just not an appreciable drop. People who already have the high-end PC’s would rather have the best thing. And this is going to be around for a while. It’s not like, six months from now, we are going to be shipping something new.
We are committed to this product.
Matzner: For a bit…?
Luckey: For this entire generation.
I think something similar to this is what Elon Musk has done with Tesla. His goal has always been to bring electric cars to the masses; that’s always been the goal. But the first car they made wasn’t the best, cheap electric car they could have made several years ago.
They needed to build the car that showed that electric cars were good before they could make that cheap car, and the technology just wasn’t there at that time to make that electric car for the masses that just wasn’t totally shitty. In a way, we’re following the same strategy.
We’re making something to convince people that virtual reality is actually the future, and I feel like we’re in a unique position to do that. Those guys that are at the lower end, they’re not going to provide the VR experience for everyone to aspire to.
Give it a few years. The Oculus Rift is going to cost next to nothing and run on far more PCs.
Editor’s Note: And then Eric spent the next few minutes trying to help Palmer find his pickup location.