The History of the Future Read online

  Early in 2013, Palmer contacted me via email, to let me know what a huge source of inspiration my novel had become for everyone working on his team at Oculus. He told me that one of their conference rooms was named “The OASIS” after the virtual universe in my book. He also told me that they gave a paperback copy of Ready Player One to every new Oculus employee when they’re hired. I was still trying to wrap my head around that when Palmer invited me to visit their offices for a book signing, and to experience what they were working on firsthand. I couldn’t say yes quickly enough.

  To hedge my bets, I set Ready Player One in the year 2045—over three decades into the future. But when Palmer and Brendan Iribe demoed their prototype of the Oculus Rift for me for the first time in their tiny offices in Irvine, it immediately became clear to me that virtual reality was coming far sooner than I’d predicted. In fact, it was already here. I’d just seen my own science fiction become science fact—literally right before my eyes.

  The future has arrived, I remember thinking as Palmer showed me his taped-together prototype of an Oculus Touch controller. And we’re already living in it.

  What follows is the fascinating story of how we reached this unique turning point in human history—the moment when we began using our technology to reshape the very nature of our existence, by fabricating an entirely new reality for our senses and ourselves.

  This is the moment in our history when we began to make our dreams come true.

  Prologue

  ON THE AFTERNOON OF MARCH 25, 2014, FACEBOOK CEO MARK ZUCKERBERG made a surprise visit to a SoCal-based start-up, where from the front of a small workplace kitchen, he proceeded to share some big news, discuss Facebook’s grand vision, and geek out over a long-sought-after wearable technology that he believed would dominate the future.

  “People describe it as, like, a religious experience,” he said, addressing an audience of about fifty engineers, entrepreneurs, and dreamers. “They go into this world”—by putting on a pair of supercharged goggles—“and when they take it off they’re, like, sad to be back in reality.”

  The tech that had Zuckerberg raving was a virtual reality headset called the Rift, and the engineers, entrepreneurs, and dreamers in that kitchen were the ones responsible for its creation. They were members of a young, cultishly popular start-up called Oculus, whose mission was to deliver the sci-fi-inspired dream of VR. “To finally make virtual reality happen!” Oculus’s then-twenty-one-year-old founder Palmer Luckey liked to say. For gaming! For education and communication! For anyone who ever wanted to throw on a headset and step into a computer-generated world where anything was possible. And though this Holy Grail goal still remained a ways away, the Oculus team suddenly felt closer to achieving this than they ever had before—because as of about an hour ago, they had just learned that Facebook would be buying their little company for three goddamn billion dollars.1,2

  “It’s unbelievable!” Zuckerberg continued.

  It was, it really was. Just two years earlier, Palmer Luckey had been living alone in a camper trailer. And now—with Oculus becoming the fastest start-up in history to reach a multibillion-dollar exit—he’d be able to buy a house not only for himself, but one nearby for his mother and father.

  What made the acquisition even more unbelievable was how out of the blue the whole thing seemed—especially to most of the team. Zuckerberg, for example, had only even visited Oculus’s office once—two months earlier—when he came by to check out a demo called “The Room” (and, to the delight of many Oculus employees, he showed up with a to-go bag of McDonald’s; Wow, they thought. Tech moguls: they’re just like us!). At the time, nobody outside a small inner circle of executives even knew that an acquisition might be in play. And if they had, they might have tried to pump the brakes. After all, the folks at Oculus weren’t a very Facebooky crowd. Their CTO, for example, didn’t even have a Facebook account; their CEO had a piece of art in his office that was just the Facebook logo on a pack of cigarettes; and employees routinely mocked Facebook for being “lame,” “poorly designed,” “privacy averse,” or “just plain parasitic.”

  Beyond the ideological differences, Facebook seemed an unlikely match for an even bigger reason: because for all intents and purposes, Oculus was a video game company—created to give players a way to “step into the game”—so selling to a console maker like Sony or Microsoft made sense. Even selling to a Silicon Valley titan like Apple or Google made some sense (after all, Apple and Google had a history of building successful hardware products). But Facebook?

  Zuckerberg had an answer to that very question when speaking to employees of his newly purchased company. “I think this has the potential to be—and you guys think about this too—to not just be the next gaming platform, but the next real computing platform.”

  He described how he believed that every ten to fifteen years a new computing platform takes hold, reaches a critical mass, and largely usurps its predecessors. Most recently, he cited, this happened with smartphones. “By the end of 2012,” Zuckerberg explained, “there were a billion active people using smartphones. And I guess around 2012 or 2013 it started to overtake computers where everyone still had a computer, but smartphones started to be the primary way that people really used computing. I think that if we push this [virtual reality] really hard it has the potential to be this for this technology as well.”

  The more Zuckerberg spoke, the more Facebook’s vision seemed to complement Oculus’s. Any concerns that this might dramatically change postacquisition were assuaged when Zuckerberg said, “We have a good history, I think, at Facebook of buying companies and having them run independently; so that’s what we’re going to do here. We’re not going to mess with the culture in any way . . . We’re here to accelerate what you’re doing. It’s just awesome and you guys should all be so proud of what you’ve built so far.”

  By the time Zuckerberg opened up the floor to questions, he had seemingly managed to squelch any lingering concerns among the Oculus employees.

  Well, except for one. An important issue—one that touched on an unnerving, underlying aspect of Facebook’s existence that would not only wind up significantly impacting Oculus, but in the years ahead, would soon be wondered aloud by millions who were increasingly concerned about how Facebook operated, why it operated that way, and what this all meant for the future of privacy, social interactivity and even liberal democracy.

  “Hey, Mark,” began Chris Dycus, Oculus’s very first employee. “Some people—not me, of course—but some people think Facebook is evil . . . so I’m wondering how that will affect the perception of Oculus.”

  Suddenly, the room fell quiet with anxiety. Save for a few choked-back chuckles of amusement. One of which came from founder Palmer Luckey, who was overcome by a singular thought: Chris Dycus has balls of steel! Seriously, that took major cojones—to ask Marky Z the question that literally everyone in this room is thinking. And though everyone in the room was thinking about the public reaction to this acquisition in some abstract way, Luckey was already dealing with tangible repercussions: from dozens of tweets along the lines of “FUCK YOU, you fucking SELL OUT” and “Thanks for killing the VR dream again” to proposed customer boycotts and even a few death threats.

  Zuckerberg smiled, relieving the tension that had been building. And as he proceeded to laugh off Dycus’s question—not in a dismissive way, but in an oh-well sort of way that seemed to ignore the severity of the already-apocalyptic online backlash—Luckey couldn’t help but wonder just a bit: what did we get ourselves into here with Facebook?

  But rather than plot out the possible permutations of what tomorrow might bring, Luckey decided that today—on this celebratory day; the day he sold his company to Facebook for more money than he could ever imagine—he would do something that he rarely ever did: he would stop looking forward and start thinking backward. Back to the beginning of how this whole crazy, extraordinary journey had started in the first place . . .

  Part 1

  The Revolution Virtual

  Chapter 1

  The Boy Who Lived to Mod

  April 10, 2012

  UNLIKE SO MANY SILICON VALLEY SUCCESS STORIES, THE TALE OF OCULUS doesn’t begin in a garage, a dorm room, or a small skunkworks lab. Instead, in a twist befitting the humble origins and pragmatic eccentricities of its founder, the tale of Oculus begins in a trailer.

  More specifically: a beat-up, second-hand nineteen-foot camper trailer that, on the afternoon of April 10, was parked in the driveway of a modest, multifamily home in Long Beach, California. The bottom floor of this home belonged to the Luckeys—Donald, a car salesman, and Julie, a homemaker—and the trailer belonged to their nineteen-year-old son: Palmer. He had been living in there for nearly two years now, and based on how things in his life had been going as of late, Palmer Luckey seemed destined to keep living there for years to come.

  From the outside, Palmer Luckey’s trailer looked absolutely ordinary. Tinted windows, fiberglass shell, and corrugated once-white siding that had faded to beige. But inside, from end to end, it had been modified to fit his own desires.

  The first thing to go was the bathroom. It just simply took up too much space, he reasoned. As convenient as having a bathroom would be, there was already a perfectly fine bathroom that he could still use in his parents’ home. And if those facilities were occupied—as they often were by Luckey’s three younger sisters—he could go try the public restroom that was located next to the Laundromat three streets away. So, the trailer’s bathroom? That could go. So too could the trailer’s kitchen. He didn’t need a specific area devoted to preparing meals when his entire diet more or less consisted of frozen burritos, Mucho Mango AriZona tea and whatever he could afford at the Jack in the Box down the r
oad. In fact, Luckey biked down to that Jack in the Box with such regularity that the manager gave him a special loyalty card entitling him to 15 percent off his meals (so special that, as Luckey would brag to friends, “it can be combined with other offers!”). Needless to say, Luckey wouldn’t be hosting any dinner parties in the near future.

  When neighbors passed Luckey’s trailer, they would invariably feel a twinge of sadness—a guttural pinch of how-could-this-be. What had become of that kid with all the promise? That bright, bubbly homeschooled boy who had started taking college courses when he was only fifteen; who, last they had heard, was enrolled at Cal State, Long Beach, studying journalism, was it? But here he was, on this sunny Tuesday April afternoon—same as every afternoon, same as every morning and evening, too—holed away, doing God knows what in that monument of wasted potential.

  Now as desolate as this situation might appear to be, one key detail cannot be ignored: Palmer Luckey loved living in that trailer. It felt, to him, like living in a spaceship; a feeling that probably had as much do with his love of science fiction books as it did with his Tonystarkian personality; that of someone who doesn’t see the world as is, but rather who—defiantly, obsessively—sees things as they could be. Which is why Luckey took so much pride in how, after gutting it, he’d transformed that trailer into a makeshift laboratory.

  The transformation began with the wide oblong cavity up front, which had been modified to fit Luckey’s six-screen computer setup, and extended all the way to the back where (instead of a bathroom) a twin mattress was propped up by a series of component-filled boxes. In between these two ends was where Luckey conducted his hardware experiments; from control boards and soldering irons to lens equipment and power supplies, this space was overrun with an unlikely alliance of gear, gadgets, and tools. Scattered about—serving as both evidence and inspiration for the chaos that occurred in this trailer—were a handful of funky, helmet-shaped prototypes for a product that was unlike anything else being manufactured in the world. All in all, it resembled Walter White’s mobile lab on Breaking Bad. But instead of being equipped to cook crystal meth, Palmer Luckey’s trailer was optimized for building virtual reality headsets.

  His obsession with virtual reality had begun three years earlier, when he was sixteen years old. At that time, the idea of an engineer building a virtual reality headset was not all that different from an archaeologist searching for the Holy Grail. To the current world at large, the quest for great VR was considered nothing more than a fool’s errand. Unlike that mythological grail, however, virtual reality did exist, and had for quite some time.1

  In 1955, cinematographer Morton Heilig wrote a paper titled “The Cinema of the Future,” which described a theater experience that encompassed all the senses.2 Seven years later, he built a prototype of what he had envisioned: an arcade-cabinet-like contraption that used a stereoscopic 3-D display, stereo speakers, smell generators, and a vibrating chair to provide a more immersive experience. Heilig named his invention the Sensorama and shot, produced, and edited five films that it could play.3

  In 1965, Ivan Sutherland, an associate professor of electrical engineering at Harvard, wrote a paper titled “The Ultimate Display.”4 In it, Sutherland explicated the possibility of using computer hardware to create a virtual world—rendered in real time—in which users could interact with objects in a realistic way. “With appropriate programming,” Sutherland explained, “such a display could literally be the Wonderland into which Alice walked.”

  Three years later, with assistance from a student named Bob Sproull, Sutherland built what is considered to be the first-ever virtual reality head-mounted display (HMD) system: the Sword of Damocles.5 Unlike the Sensorama, the Sword of Damocles actually tracked the user’s head movements (and, instead of film, placed users into a computer-generated world). But there was one major problem with Sutherland’s breakthrough: his HMD weighed so much that it had to be hung from the ceiling (hence the name “Sword of Damocles”).

  Due to the exorbitant costs and perceived lack of consumer interest, this type of reality-defying research remained primarily in labs for the next twenty years. That changed in the late ’80s with VR pioneer Jaron Lanier, whose VPL Research became the first company to go to market with virtual reality goggles. Although the company’s flagship headset, the “EyePhone 1,” was prohibitively expensive ($9,400), and required a multimillion-dollar workstation to power it, the sci-fi-like spectacle of VPL’s products (plus the budding fame of Lanier, credited with coining the term “virtual reality”) helped generate a cultural fascination for the technology.6,7,8 Meanwhile, as consumer interest was piqued, the fervor among researchers also accelerated. This was aided in no small part by a company called Fake Space Labs, founded in 1991 to develop hardware and software for high-end scientific and government projects.

  The hype for virtual reality seemed to multiply by the year. By the mid-’90s, VR was all the rage. Or, perhaps more accurately, there seemed to be unanimous consent that VR was going to be all the rage. But a decade full of flops (like Nintendo’s Virtual Boy) and failures (like Virtuality, whose arcade initiative ended in bankruptcy) transformed the hype around VR into a cautionary tale.9,10,11 When the ’90s came to an end, virtual reality was no more than the butt of a what-ever-happened-to joke in the company of jetpacks and flying cars.

  Given this fate, it may seem odd that a homeschooled, self-taught engineer like Palmer Luckey would have ever become interested in a subject matter as culturally radioactive as VR. Yet in an odd way, Luckey was uniquely qualified to try and resurrect this thought-to-be-dead technology due to his contrarian way of thinking, his love of retro-gaming (particularly ’90s classics like Chrono-Trigger, Pokémon Yellow and Super Smash Bros.) and his life-defining passion for modifying hardware—or “modding” in the parlance of hackers, gamers and tech enthusiasts.

  Specifically, Luckey was interested in a subset of modding called “portabilizing,” which involved hacking of old game consoles into playable portable devices. Given that this was a highly technical, time-consuming hobby, there weren’t all that many portabilizers out there. But there were enough that in June 2009, Luckey decided to cofound an online community called “ModRetro” that would cater to those who shared his niche interest.

  With web forums, chat rooms and a motto of “Learn, Build, Mod,” ModRetro sought to attract the world’s best, brightest and most curious portabilizers. And for the most part, Luckey’s community achieved that objective. But along the way, in the course of discussing projects and sharing work, something else happened: the purpose-driven relationships that ModRetro cultivated wound up becoming lifelong friendships.

  “Man, ModRetro days were the best,” Luckey would reflect years later. “We accidentally built a personal support community alongside the actual modding work—most of us were growing through similar periods in our life, and all of us were strange nerdy kids. For a lot of us, ModRetro was more important than any real-life group of friends.”

  Like many close friendships, those at ModRetro were imbued with a playful spirit of one-upsmanship. This type of banter didn’t just keep the chat lively; it pushed everyone to try and be better; to build faster, smaller, and as cheaply as possible. To really up the ante, community members would endeavor to do all that with the most obscure piece of hardware they could find. Which, inevitably, is what led Luckey to eBay in search of some virtual reality headsets.

  After making his first few purchases, tinkering around, and learning about the VR landscape, Luckey soon came to a critical realization:

  As much as Luckey loved portabilizing consoles, he knew that even the coolest N64 portable would never change the way people live. But virtual reality, potentially, could. For example, he had read about something called “Bravemind,” which was a virtual reality exposure therapy system that could help treat those suffering from posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD).12 Unlike previous treatments, where patients are forced to recall (and reimagine) traumatic scenarios, Bravemind enables therapists to virtually re-create those experiences—a city street in Afghanistan, a desert road in Iraq—and then walk patients through these re-creations under safe and controlled conditions.