Visionaries: Palmer Luckey and Darshan Shankar

[Applause] all right aw15 you guys are looking good 15 years um we're going to talk Hardware we're going to talk software we're going to talk content but let's start with a little story um for everyone here that might not know your flash point of when you got into VR and I don't mean just like the first time you put a headset on but like what was the setting what was it like when you first had that flasho with VR so for example I would be going down into a deep dark basement in ween Hall on Carnegie melon campus and there's probably hard drives with uh illegally downloaded songs from Napster and CRT things and and you put a headset on so um who wants to start first with your flash point well as most people know I wasn't even born 15 years ago um and yeah but but but but I you I I I I built my I built my first uh my first VR headset in 2009 uh actually barely two miles from here in Long Beach so it's very I'm glad AWA has come to Long Beach this is really the this is really the right place for it to be in my opinion um you know at the time woo you know at the time I was uh and you know I I I started Ulus a few years later after I built several more prototypes and the first prototype what became the rift I created in 2011 I was 19 years old living in a camper trailer and uh that it was the first prototype where I showed it to my friends and rather than saying Palmer this is you're wasting your time they said oh this is but I I I can imagine it going somewhere maybe you're not wasting your time and uh that was actually my my good friend Chris had that realization and uh I asked him what he was going to be doing that summer and he said oh I'm going to be working at this at this pizza place trying to save up money before I go to college I said ' no you're not we're going to start Oculus together and you're going to come work for me and that was on a Friday and then uh he told his mom he was uh moving in with his friend from the internet to start a virtual reality company and I think she didn't believe him because that was like really all the context he gave her on Monday I rolled up in my in my Pontiac Montana Minivan and he got in with all of his stuff and he drove away and he never went home and that was the start of oculus love it josa actually yeah one last bit is I wish I could point and say you guys should go to the seport marina hotel because that's where we lived for the first 3 months of oculus building headsets for all of the conferences we went to but unfortunately it was condemned shortly after we left and has since been destroyed and replaced with a mall so my story is probably a couple years after that in 2011 2012 I was obviously like Kickstarter dk1 playing with the dk1 but at that point there weren't huge softare opportunities a lot of the problems left to be solved in VR at that point were still on the hardware side and getting controllers getting tracking getting sixed off getting to Market uh the DK2 comes out by 2014 and it was abundantly clear at that point that something interesting would happen uh there was very interesting software and gaming applications that could be built and it was only a matter of time before be a consumer device uh shortly after that um after getting the DK2 I immediately started working on it full-time building uh what big screen is today so we we have software that been on every VR headset since 2016 I started working on it in 2014 uh shipped it shipped the first version in 2016 on the rift and the Vive on Steam and uh we've been on every VR headset since then I'm going to keep you back in time for a little bit before we move to today since awe's theme is like going back in history so that flasho moment that you had is that still what you're building today exact same thing except a couple years later we were like we probably need to build Hardware too but the software and the vision around what we see is most interesting in VR and what's missing in VR is the exact same vision we are still chasing today same I mean these days I'm I'm focusing a lot of my time on lethal autonomous weapon systems which is which is quite different I did build that VR headset that can kill you so I guess there's overlap there but you my my original vision of building a VR headset that would actually be mainstream that could actually be consumer like that that that people think that was my original vision but it's worth remembering when I launched the original Oculus VR website uh you can go back and read it on the Wayback machine I I'm I'm clearly trying to sell a do-it-yourself kit for VR enthusiasts and I just didn't think that VR was quite quite ready to go beyond that group you were literally going to have to build it yourself I was going to send people the parts and have software libraries but you were going to have to actually assemble it solder all the power cables on and I got some good advice from uh from actually John carmac and also Gabe Newell and a few other people that I showed it to and they said you need to build something that software developers can just use like and and software developers don't know how to build things with their hands they know how to build things with their keyboards and so you need to give them something that actually works out of the box and that was actually a huge change from everything I Hade in my mind up till that point it's a good thing that we made that change because I don't think actually I I I know this for certain on our Kickstarter we had an option for you could have a build it-yourself kit or an assembled kit I think there was a $1 difference in price and uh I think we had less than a 100 people buy the do-it-yourself kit and we had many thousands of people want the the one they built built built them that was already built for them so you bring up a good point though it's it's we don't build an isolation right we surround ourselves with people that help us make good decisions help us make the right decisions hopefully and they're specialize in things I mean specialization of Labor is what makes Humanity work if everybody had to do everything if I had to grow my own food and clean my own you know clean my own plumbing and and and you know build my own car I would I would have a much lower standard for all of those things than if I can allow someone to specialize in each Daran who have you surrounded yourself with to help you make the right decisions Sim Journey uh just really smart people uh whether it's for the software that we're building or the hardware that we've since built uh it's just finding really really smart people uh whether it's you know asking Palmer for certain advice on things or uh carac or uh plenty of other people many of whom came from Oculus and started Oculus it's been very helpful to be surrounded by people who have just been in the game for a long time right for people that haven't been in the game for a long time where do you find these people I mean are you just emailing John carac like I think if you do interesting things and you go show people the interesting things that you're actually making and the interesting ideas that you have the research that you have done regardless of your age or whether you have funding or or not like other smart people want to help you naturally like just on on Monday night uh we had a big screen Beyond customer and Community member come over 17-year-old kid really really smart and showing things that he has built that work that are really interesting ideas and you don't have to have a lot of funny you don't need to know people you just just go do interesting things and people will want to help you but I will know you noted that he's 17 and then you you said regardless of age but I we've talked about this but my my strong opinion is one of the most valuable assets you have as a young person is your age people want to help you when you're young they'll respond to your I'm not saying you can send Bad Emails and they'll help you you need to be specific like here's what I'm doing here's why it's interesting here's why I think you could help me and here's what I'm looking for you as help don't just say I'd like to speak with you what's a good time that's not going to work but if you can be more specific people want to help young kids the younger the better when I get an email from somebody who's 15 I want to help them if they're 14 I really want to help them and I benefited this from my early career so much like I think John karmac one of the reasons he was willing to humor me and talk with me is because I was an 18 and then 19-year-old kid when you're a whiz kid everyone wants to talk to you once you're a whiz man nobody cares with ladies out there too so if there's any young kids out there like go go and ask for all the intros you're going to need before you get too old or you'll be like me and nobody's going to respond to your emails anymore but Dar you bring up also a good point about doing your research and looking what so there's something about having an idea moving forward but grounding it in what's come before and doing your research and I mean you did a ton of research early on Palmer we're like you're not doing you're probably digging into the archive of things to find out what have people done what has failed where where did you go to look for that research to ground where you're moving forward to I read every single bit of published literature I could find on VR I mean I mean all of it like I was just downloading into my brain you know like like you know like I was in The Matrix like i e sigra like old i e and sigraph papers but also a lot of Old Navy research documents a lot of old army research documents some of the stuff had been Declassified some of it had never been classified but there you know remember there's there's a huge amount of government and academic and Commercial investment in VR and I was also trying to buy a lot of these artifacts you know I before I started Oculus I had the world's largest virtual reality headset collection I had over 89 headsets no not over I had exactly 89 headsets the day that I launched the Oculus Kickstarter and I had stuff from the 80s the 90s I had NASA stuff military stuff I was buying it for pennies on the dollar and a lot of it I took apart and then put back together so I could learn what worked and what didn't I mean if if you don't know what people have done before you're going to make exactly the same mistakes you're not going to make different mistakes you'll make the exact same ones if you learn from them you get to make brand new mistakes and and that's that's that's what you want to be doing every day new mistakes and I think similarly uh for for us by the time we were getting started in VR we were just a few years later right so there's plenty of literature already out there there's plenty of uh content that people are making or Hardware that people are making so things that we can learn from so again similarly just talking to interesting people and Building Things So when we get into hardware and and big screens pivot and we'll talk about that a little later uh we didn't go to people I didn't I didn't talk to people like hey we want to go make Hardware what do you think how do I do it it's like no like I've done my research before I've I've gone deep into whether it's Optics or displays or tracking or how does VR work not not like a Wikipedia article of how does we VR work but like actually understanding from software through graphics cards and output to displays and Optics the full stack top to bottom so go do your homework and start to figure out what's missing go talk to customers go talk to users and it helped for us that we were building and shipping VR software for so many years that we know what's missing we use VR every day you can tell okay these are the missing problems this is what customers want this is what I want here's how the technology works and then when I reach out when I reach out to say um Palmer or carac or uh Jerry from til 5 or a few other people like narab from framework these are people who have built and shipped successfully consumer Hardware before but then my questions are hyper targeted like here is a question I have about this problem that I'm dealing with do you have advice about this one thing not hey can we grab coffee sometime in a few months if you're free uh so what's the best answer you've ever gotten to one of those uh the questions do you have an answer has there ever been a nah don't have an answer why don't you find out what it is I think the interesting ones for me were when people challenge my assumptions like I would assume well we did this and this but to get to the next stage we really need to do that and multiple people are like nope you probably don't maybe you're doing it right already I give I give bad answers all the time but I usually try to caveat them like here's this problem I started the company when I was 19 and I happened to be working on something that was feasible for the first time really at a major scale because computers were better because displays were better because motion trackers were better and so I I I happen to be doing the right thing at the right time and then there's this huge group of people that understands that's because I was doing the right thing at the right time and then there's other people who believe that it's due to some innate you know uh Insight that I must have and they say Palmer what what's the secret if you could distill The Secret of building a business into one line what is it I'm like I don't know man I'm 31 years old like I'm I'm I'm still figuring this out too and like Palmer you know what what do you think about large language models and I've say dude I don't know that's not what I work on um and and I'll I'll tell them I'll I mean I'll just make stuff up like I I can I could I can give you my I could give you my opinion uh but uh I I know I've given I've given lots of I I liked your point about you should ask a specific question that's hyper targeted at someone's expertise because otherwise you're like narv a very early employ at Oculus he was our Hardware lead and he's gone to start framework and they're building an incredible laptop and some other stuff too so you should really check it out now narv is incredible about that like I probably wouldn't ask narv for help with uh like like television appearances no offense to narv uh but but like you know it's it's it's not that hasn't been qued his strategy and there's other people I I wouldn't want their opinion on how to build a hardware company or a manufacturing team but I absolutely would want their opinion on how do I come across well in the one minute that I'm going to get on CNBC and so I that that I think is key you really need to hyper Target your questions be very specific about how people can help you because there's a lot I can't help you with all right so I'm going to hyper Target a question here what were you doing yesterday at 3:24 we're bringing it into the present now yesterday at 3:24 what were you doing I think I was at the the reality hack Booth checking out what they were doing there I don't know if any of you guys are out there woo um but you know that that that that that's a lot of fun look this gets back to you know all all the young people they get all the they get all they get all the attention everybody wants to help to help the kids um so that yeah that's what I was doing uh yesterday 3:24 we were actually getting our La team together so we have a factory that we own and operate here in LA and we were getting the team together to celebrate cuz a year ago we announced big screen beyond our first generation VR headset and we have now successfully shipped it we we started shipping last August and you know we've been very busy these past nine months building and shipping you you should you should show it to people because I think a lot of people we suspensefully put items on the table like a good dramatic uh Cliffhanger here what is on the table here all so all right we got we got two things hang on [Applause] [Laughter] you get close up on that yeah yeah that photo shoot with wired the the guy who did all these great pictures and they put put really nice makeup on me and like I didn't have bagas under my eyes and they said just for this one just just make like a scow like you really get really mad and I did it and that was this covers when I learned you don't have to do what the phographer tells you just just tell him no and they put these like Palpatine bags under my eyes and and they're like this guy is's going to he's going to destroy the world with his v um anyway so that there's that b then the other bit is uh I have one of the one of the first DK 1's that was ever made and it's it's just interesting it's been 10 years ago you couldn't buy a DK2 yet so this was kind of the best you could get and it weighs 349 gram and it had a resolution nominally of 800x 640 per eye but actually due to panel utilization you were getting about 60% of those actually active pixels and it's kind of crazy how far we've come I think people don't understand how how how far people how far things have where you're able to ship a there we go so this thing weighs barely over 100 G it's a third of the weight it is 20 times as many pixels sometimes when people say oh man it seems like vr's not really moving it seems like it's kind of stuck in time that's how I know that they're not in the VR industry because if you're in the VR industry you know dude you can buy a headset it's 20 times higher resolution and it's only been 10 years I mean 10 years is a long time but when people think that things aren't moving it's cuz they see it from the outside and what they really mean is it's not as popular is the Nintendo Wii yet but I mean you had like Oculus Quest sold almost 20 million units in one year that's better sales than the Nintendo 64 was getting during its very best year of sales ever that's better than the first two years of iPhone sales managed to pull by a lot it's just vr's actually come a really long way it's just people's expectations of what success is you know they they've they they really they really inflated I mean you've you've been working on this stuff for a long time could you imagine if you had told people yo yeah there's going to be 20 million people buying a VR headset and the media is going to consider that a failure like wouldn't that just like blown people's minds yeah I mean it was hard to get people to go down into a Dungy basement to put a brick on their face and I mean I I produced the first feature film that was released on the dk1 and the content side of things it's awesome to see all the hardware Evolution and the software Evolution the content side of things I think you know there are some challenges in in really radically approaching how we're approaching content and the usability and the UI factors but I mean this is phenomenal Aran congratulations thank you oh and the reason I forgot this is the June 2014 issue of wired so it's actually been exactly 10 years since this thing came out um so it says it's about to change gaming movies TV music design medicine sex Sports art travel social network education and reality itself so I I guess my question is has it done has it done that yet I I don't I think we're still waiting but but it's a good headline it's a good headline for sure but but also how many uh DK 1s were sold we sold 55,000 DK 1s total but I have about a thousand of those on pallets in my storage unit um and what about DK2 in 2014 so the we I don't know if we've ever publicly said this but a couple hundred thousand it was it was about 250,000 so and and the big difference there is DK2 I mean that was DK2 was the first good VR headset okay dk1 was was was a vehicle for people who understood and could extrapolate to understand where this was going but like the low persistence displays the much improved Optics mostly the sixth degree of Freedom tracking all in a product you could actually buy that was it was the first good VR headset and people and I know he said if you guys remember if you were ordering one back then you remember you to check the little box say I am a game developer I am not a consumer and I understand that there is not consumer level support for this device people were buying it just to play games on Steam I mean that was that was pretty cool and by the way the reason that we did 55,000 of them was because up to that point the best selling headmount of display of all time was it was the what what do we call it in the US it was um The Philips scuba or in Japan it was marketed as the tatara dinov visor and uh and uh that that sold exactly 50,000 units and I happened to know that from doing my market research and I knew that if we did 55,000 that would guarantee we were the best selling VR headset of all time even if Oculus completely collapsed and fell um and I I'm glad I'm glad we did that luckily we didn't collapse and fail uh by some definition of claps and fail I suppose and then 10 years later now gorilla tag has a million daily active users yeah it's it's it's it's kind it's kind of hard to believe I feel like that's one of those things that people in the outskirts of VR right outside VR like ah VR never really took off it was it was just a thing and never really went anywhere it's like no there's a million people playing gorilla tag every single day and part of what's happened is the I said this earlier but the expectation of what success is has so massively expanded like people forget that they're only like in the US they're only something like I think it's like 20 7 million Nintendo 64s sold and everyone agreed like that was a cultural icon and everyone remembers using what like it's just that the bar for Success has been changed by phones that sell hundreds of millions of units every single year by companies that'll ship a billion devices in in a year like like what mediatech the company that builds you like the these embedded processors I think on their website it's it's more you know McDonald's is like you know billions and billions sold I think mediatech has been in 33 billion devices it's just it's just mindboggling so VR is just trying to trying to catch up trying to catch up yeah I mean we're looking at these headset devices but you started out as a software company and I think all of these pieces the software the hardware the content play together it's like yeah you're shipping Hardware devices but there's stuff on there that people are engaging with and interacting within or keeping them coming back so you started on the software side how did you get to the hardware side well it started with a vision of I think what we wanted to be able to do with VR um and after a couple years of shipping it on on Rift and then go and Quest and so on uh we kept hitting walls uh walls due to platform policies that are stupid and people at power that we're just creating needless barriers to be able to innovate for example if you want to do something send us a pitch deck or no we have the data that's not interesting it's like no get out of the way like we're developers going to go to make interesting things uh but also uh Hardware because we thought people weren't building the devices that needed to exist so every headset that was about 350 G in 2014 uh cv1 was probably about the same 300ish G it got it got it got a little heavier but yeah yeah in that ballpark but ever since then it started dramatically increasing in weight especially once you got to Quest class Standalone devices that's you know 550 Plus grams uh Vision Pro now a decade later at 700 plus grams and and that's without the battery so once the batter is off of you but if it happened to actually be on your face that's a kilogram but 700 g on your face I feel like there's a lot of disrespect for for VR users from people making hardware and designing hardware and the disrespect I think starts because they're not actually using the hardware it's mostly people with billions of dollars to play with who don't use VR but are thinking about it more from a well this is the next platform let's own the next one we ought to do some R&D on it but I don't think a lot of the people who are making decisions about what should be or not be in a device I don't think they are they probably haven't used VR Che whatever I'll put it that way right they probably haven't used a VR at all in the last month oh I said it I said the Forbidden The Forbidden truth and I feel feel the same way on the content side it's like he's got the same people that have made something for a different platform trying to Port it over and not realizing that they're different affordances on this new platform meanwhile meanwhile I'm just doing the same thing I've been a hardware guy all along and so I'm I'm I'm I'm just going to keep doing that yep and I feel like we had a very strong opinion about what needed to happen so instead of going heavier and heavier and heavier we went lighter so from the first day in which we really embarked seriously on on Hardware um we had a philosophy called every gram matters something that we have adhered to very strictly uh and that's why our device is now 127 gram we said no to a lot of things and I think there are a lot of uh Hardware designers or Executives that aren't saying no enough but instead are chasing maybe a theoretical vision of where the industry could go and I'm going to I'm Circle this back into today um Palmer I think it's kind of cool actually where you've gone because it is actually full circle like a lot of our funding in the 90s came from DARPA like this industry that we all know and love so much was very much funded and supported um by the US government to begin with and you're almost as like full circle coming back to that but if you were let's say to start today um in the VR industry with zero priors what would you do oh that's interesting you know not just like darp and DOD with VR in general even me specifically so I don't know if everyone knows this but I worked at the USC ICT mix reality lab before starting Oculus and that's an army affiliate Research Center doing all kinds of stuff between the Army and Hollywood so you know I I I mean that was that was really important even just for what I've done personally so they they've kept it alive in general but they they they kind of kept it alive for me and got me exposed to a lot of things I never would have been exposed to otherwise um you know I'm I'm I'm still very much in the hardware space I'm actually building a new headset right now uh it's it's driven by yeah yeah it's driven by military requirements but it's also going to be used for for non-military stuff and it's it it's really cool it's really something I I I've been going around telling people that I'm doing it because if they don't know you're working on a headset then you only get to talk to people that you reach out to like I can reach out to you and that's great but uh if until everybody knows you're working on something you're not going to get the people reaching out to you particularly the younger people the newer people the smaller companies that you don't even know about uh they're not going to reach out to you unless they know that you're actually doing something so if you've got things like structured light structured light based systems that are above 12 00 ners up to 1550 ners would be great that you know that'd be really very great for light security reasons but you know I'm I'm I'm loving what I'm doing doing VR now for some cool military stuff but if I was starting again with no priors you know I'm why am I doing I'm doing what I'm doing because I've started a defense technology company if I was starting from nothing and I had absolutely none of my network none of my money I'd want to find an area where I could punch above my weight uh and I I I know you know this we talked about it before I think it would be an adult entertainment uh it let me let me get like the thing is it there there there's a that's a very broad area um but but most of the big companies will refuse to compete in that area and so it's something where if you're starting with nothing you'll punch way above your weight the people who should be competing with you refuse to do it because they've got their eyes on bigger prizes like being the dominant gaming platform which they think being in adult entertainment would hurt they want to be the you know the the the VR device that's in every single school and they know that that would potentially be bad for them but you adult entertainment is a broad space there there a lot of different things you know like the the Army was researching teledildonics for years to help deploy troops reconnect with their spouses and and and and wait we explain what that is teledildonic it's self-explanatory U but do you guys know what this is yeah yeah oh okay I mean so you a lot of this is not even it's doesn't mean like adult ENT you adult VR doesn't necessarily mean like PornHub VR there's a huge vast breadth of Human Experience that's contained in that that the big companies just aren't going to touch so I I don't know maybe I would come to a different conclusion but if I was starting from scratch I would look and say like okay if I'm starting a new hardware company like a new headset company I'm up against a lot of great people with a lot of money and a lot of talent uh if I do a new game same thing I'm going to be up against some really really sharp people adult entertainment it it's kind of a wasteland and it's and and I I bet I could do pretty well it's not what I'm going to be doing nobody write the story saying that I'm starting starting that but you know like and and and and and I think that's also one of the things that everybody wants it some people like oh but only dudes would want it no I've seen Outlander I know what that is it's it's that that's for chicks and and and you know it's very much this category or Bridgerton I know what that is that's just British themed pornography for women uh so wa are you saying that the biggest play Space right now in in the VR is in the content side of things I I I think that's where the biggest opportunity is coming from the outside I I I hate to as someone who is playing in the hardware space the hardware space is where some of the most important gains can be had but I would be very loed as a newcomer to come in and say I think I could do I think the hardware game is a game for people who have gotten their feet under them and have a network and people trust them and they're willing to make a bet on them I mean you know this like you couldn't have built that if that was the first thing that you built you were able to do it because you already had trust with a network also money coming in money coming in to help you do it from something that actually made sense anyway that's what I would that's what I would do okay top that Daron go there is just pigy backing off of that there is no way we could have done Hardware without having done software first it also taught us so much about what hardware needed we would have built really dumb Hardware if we didn't build software for a long time would you even say that there's people building Hardware today that may have done that you may say it may even be said some people are saying I know it you know it everybody knows it yep I I think getting into Hardware was pretty hard uh brutally hard and very very risky uh however I think the thing that I would do if I was starting completely from scratch today with none of the knowledge that I have right now in software or hardware for VR um would be the thing that I think is the scariest most ambitious which would be in gaming in VR Gaming uh particularly because there's a there's I I still believe that the best games for people to play still haven't even been created that being said I'm terrified by it just because there is an enormous amount of competition in in games for VR because the consumer who whether you have a quest or whatever headset that you've got you've got so much Choice you've got Choice outside side of VR you've got an enormous amount of entertainment options and we're living in a Renaissance of gaming there's there has never been this much amazing gaming content for you to play whether in VR or not however there are still so few incredible titles for people to play every day after school and I think that's a very exciting opportunity and it doesn't take a lot of people some of the best games for VR were typically made by one to 10 people without very much funding at all so the number of Studios that are spending tens of millions of dollars or more it doesn't have to be that way at all and and I think it's just a very very interesting space because there's also a huge user base now in uh the VR industry that wasn't there a long time ago so if you build something interesting you could build a massive business off of it so I'm seeing a common theme in scary and ambitious and what about you what would you be doing if you were starting from scratch no priors no network no money I would probably be doing exactly what I'm doing right now I think that the The Narrative Tech field has not been able to advance uh as radically as software or as um hardware and I think that there is definitely a challenge to resolving the narrative Paradox narrative Paradox yeah the the uh I only know what the narrative Paradox is because you explained it to me so I get to not yes yes narrative Paradox so the The Narrative the more interactivity that you have the the harder it is to tell a story and to create a narrative and vice versa yes the conflict between the line pre-authored content and the interactive gaming content and and resolving that in a truly generative way um and it's something I've been thinking about for probably decades since I came into VR in an interactive space with the classical storytelling background so um I'm hoping to push that forward a little bit it'll be fun to come back in 10 years and you can maybe help tell the the narrative story of how VR got to being with a billion people that's fingers crossed right guys billion people 10 years let's make it happen yeah I think we got the hardware software content combo here that can make it happen do it thank you everyone thank you Daran thank you Palmer we love all of you thank you

Channel: AWE

Views: 6,801

Keywords: Augmented Reality, Virtual Reality, AR Events, VR Events, AWE Nite meettup

Id: Q97dRg8jijQ

Length: 30min 40sec (1840 seconds)

Published: Thu Jun 20 2024