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Palmer Luckey

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Palmer Luckey was born and raised in Long Beach, California and grew up with three younger sisters, a mother, and a father who worked as a car salesman. As a child he was homeschooled by his mother, took sailing lessons, and had an interest in electronics. He took community college courses at Golden West College and Long Beach Community College beginning at the age of 14 or 15, and started at California State University in 2010 as journalism major. He also wrote and served as the online editor for one of the university's student-run newspapers The Daily49er. From ages 11 to 16, Palmer Luckey experimented with a variety of high-voltage electronics projects including coil guns, tesla coils, and lasers. He built a PC costing tens of thousands …show more content…

By age 18 he created his first VR prototype in his parent’s garage, in 2011, called CR1 and it featured a 90-degree field of view. Over the next 10 months he developed a series of prototypes exploring features like 3D stereoscopy, wireless, and extreme 270-degree field-of-view, while also decreasing size and weight. His sixth generation unit was name the “Rift” which was intended to be sold as a do it yourself kit for fellow VR enthusiasts instead of a pre-assembled consumer device. John Carmack from id Software, a notable game developer and regular at MTBS3D, requested one of the prototype headsets, made improvements to it, and demoed a modified version of id Software's Doom 3 BFG Edition at the Electronic Entertainment Expo 2012. Soon after, Luckey dropped out of college to focus entirely on the Oculus VR due to the resulting attention from the Expo. Luckey first showed a prototype of his device to former executive of Gaikai and Scaleform, Brendan Iribe who invested hundreds of thousands of dollars in the Rift’s Kickstarter campaign. Iribe joined as Oculus Rifts CEO and Michael Antonov (the former CTO of Scaleform) join as chief software architect. Luckey also received endorsements from Valve’s managing director Gabe Newell and the software veteran Michael Abrash who became the Chief Scientist

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