Palmer Luckey has IT issues. We’re due to speak – but he can’t be contacted. Eventually, his UK PR gets in touch. “Palmer hasn’t even received any emails,” he says. “Emails can’t get in from outside the building.”

It’s September 19, 2016, the day before the Oculus Rift, the virtual reality headset Luckey invented, goes on sale in the UK.

It’s also the date of Luckey’s 24th birthday.


Do you remember your 24th birthday? Maybe you do; maybe you don’t; maybe it hasn’t happened yet. Whatever: take all thoughts about this event and remove them from your mind. Because Palmer Luckey has lived a life unlike any twenty-four-year-old you have ever met.

Consider this: you’re 19 and you invent a virtual reality headset. A month before your birthday, you post it on Kickstarter, where it raises $2.4 million. By the time you’re 20, you’re a millionaire.

Read next IKEA’s AR experiments show the potential of Apple Glass IKEA’s AR experiments show the potential of Apple Glass

“It is potentially the final computing platform. This is generalising, but if you have perfect virtual reality, you don't have to perfect much else.” Palmer Luckey, Oculus founder

You drop out of college to go full time on Oculus. Then Facebook buys your company for $2 billion. You’re 21 and worth $700 million.


What else? Oh yes: TIME puts you on its cover, floating in front of an image of a beach. Now you’re a meme. Someone sues you, claiming you’re a fraud. And then there’s the business, now a multinational operation with “several hundred people” – such is the level of secrecy you can’t reveal the exact number. And still you’re barely 24. It's unimaginable.

[twitter id="777906570965508096"]

But if you ask Luckey himself, he says: “You know, it's kind of weird, but I don’t think all that much has changed. Until very recently we've been very much doing the same thing we're always doing.”

Read next I recreated my local pub in VR I recreated my local pub in VR

It’s the day after our scheduled meeting, and in San Francisco, where Luckey is based, it’s 9am. He joins our call with a boisterous, “How's it going!” If he’s tired or hungover he’s doing a good job hiding it. How did he spend his 24th birthday?


“I worked.”

Oh. Is that all?

“I also went out to dinner with some friends. But mostly I really like being at work. That’s where all my friends are right now anyway.”

Luckey’s official title at Oculus is “founder”, but he’s not the boss. “I've never wanted to be a CEO,” he says. “I handed over that role real fast when I started the company.” Thirty-seven-year-old Brendan Iribe runs the place, worrying about things like why emails aren’t getting through. (Luckey: “Yeah, we're rolling through some kind of email migration, I'm not sure what the details are.”) Luckey, who dislikes shoes, wanders around barefoot or in surfer-style flip-flops. When he decided to deliver the first Oculus Rift in person, he was photographed wearing a Hawaiian shirt in the Alaskan winter.

Read next Medal of Honor's Oculus reboot is a breakthrough for VR gaming Medal of Honor's Oculus reboot is a breakthrough for VR gaming

Day-to-day, his role is hard to define. He helps external developers create material for VR, and works on cool new hardware, such as Oculus’ long-awaited Touch hand controllers, which he says should be launching soon. “That was my pet project for a couple of years, so that's pretty exciting to finally get that out there.”

Luckey also thinks about the future of virtual reality. Not so much the next steps: “Higher resolution, lighter weight, lower cost – those are just really obvious.” He’s excited by facial recognition, eye-tracking or the ability to make virtual scans of your immediate environment.

“Those are the types of things that are eventually going to turn virtual reality and augmented reality, which is really just the same technology but on a different end of the use case spectrum, into something that we actually use every day,” he says.

Luckey spends “a lot of time” playing games, but when he talks about the uses of VR he has far bigger things in mind than gaming. “This idea of virtual reality as a gaming technology is actually a really very recent idea. If you look back 10, 20 even 30 years, virtual reality in science fiction is always depicted as an enabling technology to enable people to do all kinds of things. Like working remotely, education, medical training, really anything you can imagine in this kind of digital parallel world where the rules of the real word don't apply.”

Ah yes, science fiction. Speak to anyone in VR and it’s never long before it comes up. At Oculus, the inspiration is explicit: on arrival, each new employee is presented with a copy of Ernest Cline’s VR novel, Ready Player One. Which is weird when you think about it, because Ready Player One isn’t motivational reading, it’s a dystopia.

Read next Valve Index is a risky, reluctant play to own VR gaming Valve Index is a risky, reluctant play to own VR gaming

Luckey downplays that aspect of the book. He’s spoken to Cline, he says, as well as other science-fiction authors. He doesn’t think their books were intended as predictions. “The reality is that when people make dystopian worlds based on VR, whether it's Ready Player One, or Snow Crash or The Matrix, the honest truth is, they’re trying to tell a good story, and a good story has conflict.”

“Nobody really wants to make a story about VR,” he continues, “where the plot is that virtual reality comes around, changes the world, makes it a better place and everything kind of goes on as it is but better, because that’s not an interesting story to tell.”

That’s also not the way the world tends to work. In fact, for Luckey and Oculus, conflict is already here, most notably in the form of HTC and Valve, whose rival Vive headset beat Oculus to market. Sony and Google are releasing competitors, as is – reportedly – Apple. And of course Oculus is owned by Facebook, an aggressive giant whose founder and CEO roused his troops by chanting the Latin battle cry, “Carthago delenda est!”

Is Luckey ready for the wars to come? “Well, I think we have to be!” he says. “The platform wars are of course inevitable.” But, he adds, “I want good VR to exist, I want to use it for all the things I've always wanted to use it for. Making the best VR platform is certainly an end to that, but my goal at the end of the day is not to go to bed and then wake up to win a platform war. It's to wake up and go make VR incredible.”

Maybe Luckey’s just glad to have company. After all, he’s been working on virtual reality since he was 16 – and back then, he says, most people just thought he was crazy. “When you're the only company working on something, you really do seem like a bunch of nutters. When there's a bunch of companies that are all working on it, that's kind of a good sign. It means other people see what you see, and that they agree it's going to be significant.”


But here’s the thing: when Luckey says all he wants to do is to see VR exist, he seems to mean it. On his Twitter feed, he regularly endorses rival products: the new, more powerful Playstation earned a “This is good for VR!”, even though it was designed for Sony's competitor headset. In the early days of Oculus, Luckey planned to sell the blueprints to the Rift for enthusiasts to build themselves. Even after all this time, he appears to feel the same way. He’s heading towards the promised land of science-fiction, where all conflicts will be resolved and we will have freedom to do whatever we want.

“VR is basically the ultimate technology,” he says. “It is potentially the final computing platform. This is generalising, but if you have perfect virtual reality, you don't have to perfect much else.” In other words, you can stop fighting, because there’s nothing left to conquer.

But in tech, very little is accomplished without a fight. Fun matters, but so do tactics and strategy, the IT issues of the daily grind. Will Palmer Luckey still be dreaming happily of VR on his 25th birthday? “I've been going at this for quite some time,” he says. “And I still like doing it.” Maybe, ultimately, that’s all that matters.