The History of the Future Page 4

  Maybe, Luckey reasoned, he’d be more hirable after obtaining a formal college degree. He was pursuing a journalism degree at California State University, Long Beach, and he had even been named the online editor in chief for the school’s student newspaper. Luckey’s “backup plan” (if you could even call it that anymore) was to become a tech journalist; if he couldn’t build gadgets and gizmos for a living, then at least he’d get to write about other people who did. But after applying for a writing position, and then not even hearing back from the one site that seemed like a no-brainer—Hackaday, a blog that covered the type of modding he loved to do—Luckey had to face the facts: journalism might not end up being in the cards either.

  Maybe, he thought, things would change after he graduated with a degree. But he wouldn’t even get the chance to test that possibility: back in December, due to a glitch with the school’s class-scheduling software, he’d missed his window to enroll for classes. Okay, he thought, I’ll just take this semester off. But now apparently, going forward, a freeze had been placed on increases in enrollment. This shouldn’t have really mattered anyway because, after that, he had applied as a transfer student to USC. Which not only was a better fit but, if he were a student there, then he’d be able to continue working at ICT. That wouldn’t end up happening, either; because as Luckey had recently found out, he had been rejected from USC.

  So, at that moment in 2012, Luckey had no idea what he was supposed to do next. Even though he was a through-and-through optimist, it was hard not to feel flustered by the tyranny of the status quo. But when the clock struck 2:28 p.m. on this fateful April afternoon, Luckey received a message from one of his childhood heroes that was about to change everything.

  Chapter 2

  Carmack the Magnificent

  April 2012

  IT WAS JUST SUPPOSED TO BE A MARKETING GIMMICK.

  Six months earlier, in October 2011, id Software—the Dallas-based game developer best known for pioneering the first-person shooter genre—released a new game called Rage.

  “A visual marvel,” declared IGN, in their review of the game.1 “A breakout achievement,” hailed VentureBeat.2 And, quite succinctly, “Carmack!” cheered the New York Times, referring to id’s legendary technical director, John Carmack.3

  Instead of taking a victory lap, Carmack—a thin, blond-haired forty-one-year-old coder whose work (and speech) often made him seem part machine—proceeded with his typical postlaunch ritual. “A little R&D period,” he liked to call it. A little break from game development to think more broadly about the future.

  Typically, these little R&D periods didn’t lead to larger endeavors, but occasionally, there would be a venture to pursue. Such was the case in 2000, when after finishing Quake III: Arena, Carmack decided he wanted to learn about rocketry and soon after founded a company called Armadillo Aerospace (whose goal was to build a suborbital spacecraft capable of space tourism). Regardless of outcome, these were periods Carmack greatly enjoyed and for this one, following the release of Rage, he decided to focus on virtual reality.

  When asked why virtual reality, Carmack would say, “no particular reason.” And while there may not have been a specific inciting incident, an almost equally accurate answer could have been “it was only a matter of time.” Because in many ways, virtual reality was the unspoken end point of where his engineering efforts had always been heading.

  AS A BOY—YEARS BEFORE HE’D PLAY HIS FIRST COMPUTER GAME—JOHN CARMACK got his gaming fix with tabletop role-playing games like Dungeons & Dragons.4 Though what he enjoyed even more than playing these games was overseeing them in the role of Dungeon Master. That enabled him—either from the rulebook or his imagination—to speak adventures into existence; and then when he grew bored with the loose restrictions of those rulebooks, Carmack moved to charting his own invented journeys on sheets of graph paper. Between that passion for world-building, and a penchant for fantasy or science fiction novels, it was clear from early on that Carmack preferred to spend his time inventing complex worlds or inhabiting those which had been invented by others. So naturally, he was drawn to the godly power and as-you-wish obedience of programming on computers.

  Of all the things to program, Carmack’s favorite soon became graphics. He loved how something as simple as binary code—just a mishmash of 1’s and 0’s—led to the creation of colors, images, and actions on a screen. But life behind the keyboard can be lonely. Like Palmer Luckey, Carmack found solace and purpose-driven friendship online, spending his teenage years hanging out on dial-up-accessible bulletin board systems—BBSs—where visitors could post notices, trade messages, and swap software. This exposed him to an incredible underworld of computer games; and eventually, while he was still in high school, Carmack set out to make a game of his own.

  That game (Shadowforge) and his next (Wraith: The Devil’s Demise) were both distributed by a small publisher, Nite Owl Productions. Neither game sold many copies, but just the fact that they sold any—that Carmack had created something good enough for others to spend their time playing—that was pretty damn awesome. And even more awesome: his work for Nite Owl got him hired to write a tennis game for a much larger, Louisiana-based publisher called Softdisk. There, Carmack met a handful of kindred spirits, three of whom he would end up starting his own game studio with in 1991: id Software.

  At the time of id’s founding, almost all the best-loved and best-selling games were being made exclusively for consoles. There was a good reason for this: with underpowered graphics, computer games just couldn’t match the speed and splendor of those made for consoles. Take, for example, a side-scrolling console game like Super Mario Bros. When players decide to run Mario (or Luigi) across the screen, the “camera” is able to keep up, keeping our hero in the frame and doing so in a smooth and seamless manner. With computer games, however, this was not the case. If a character moved beyond the frame, this would lead him to an entirely new screen. That’s just how it was, an understandable by-product of underpowered graphics, and this remained the norm until John Carmack came up with a technique called “adaptive tile refresh” that made it possible for personal computers—PCs—to perform smooth and seamless Mario-like scrolling. In fact, to prove just how Mario-like their games could be, the founders of id Software made a demo called Dangerous Dave in Copyright Infringement, which near perfectly re-created the first level of Super Mario Bros. 3 (save for swapping out Mario with a spritely dude named Dave).

  This breakthrough technique, adaptive tile refresh, became the centerpiece of id’s first game: Commander Keen. Though that game sold pretty well, it still only sold pretty well “for a computer game.” That was the qualifier that was always used back then; because compared to hit console games (like Super Mario Bros, which sold tens of millions of copies), or even just mildly successful console games (like Hogan’s Alley, which sold over a million copies), the best-selling computer games (even those part of popular franchises like Ultima or Zork) rarely managed to crack a hundred thousand copies. So that qualifier existed—“for a computer game”—but it wouldn’t last for much longer. Because after Commander Keen, id was able to change the perception of PC gaming with a decade full of megahits: like Wolfenstein 3-D (which sold over two hundred thousand copies), Quake (which sold over one million copies), and most notably Doom (which, at one point in the early 90s, Microsoft determined was installed on more PCs than their flagship Windows software5).

  Games like Wolfenstein 3-D, Quake, and Doom made Carmack a rock star, and techniques like adaptive tile refresh, surface caching, and Carmack’s reverse made him a legend within the gaming community. But there was also something else about him—something ideological in nature—that elevated Carmack from mere living legend to Gandalfian hero: a belief that openness, open sourcing, and technological transparency were critical to innovation. In a now-famous blog post entitled “Parasites,” Carmack likened software patents to “mugging someone,” explaining that “in the majority of cases in software, patents effect independent invention.”6

  These were not just empty words. Carmack lived by this credo. That’s why he always publicly shared the source code for his games (after they had been released); that’s why he regularly provided elaborate advice to hardware vendors (like Sony, Microsoft, and Nvidia); and that’s why he readily divulged experimental findings and in-progress theories when delivering keynote speeches (particularly at QuakeCon, an annual celebration of id Software’s games).

  In fact, Carmack believed so greatly in the importance of this type of behavior—sharing, advising, divulging—that when he sold his company to ZeniMax Media in 2009 (and then signed a five-year-contract to work for his acquirer), he had special provisions written into that contract so that he could continue. That hadn’t been easy to get in there. But the reason they acquiesced for the man fans called “Carmack the Magnificent” was because, over the course of twenty-one years, id Software had proven time and time again that Carmack’s open and transparent approach worked. It had turned id’s three iconic games—Wolfenstein, Doom, and Quake—into bona fide blockbuster franchises. And though—in October 2011—initial sales of Rage turned out to be less than ZeniMax had anticipated, there was still hope that it would lead to another world-class IP.

  Right after the release, however, Carmack wasn’t interested in thinking about sequels or spin-offs just yet. First, he wanted to enjoy the exploration of another one of his R&D periods. But what to explore? Well, around this time, many of the major electronics manufacturers were hyping 3-D TVs as the next frontier of television. Personally, Carmack was not too bullish on the odds of 3-D TVs going mainstream, but it was significant to him that both Sony and Microsoft had just released extensions that would allow their consoles to drive 3-D TVs. And somewhere along the way, while thinking more about stereoscopy—the process of presenting two images (one for the right eye, one for the left) in such a way to give the impression of three-dimensional depth—Carmack found himself wondering about virtual reality.

  Carmack hadn’t really thought much about virtual reality since the ’90s, back when “VR” was one of the tech world’s hottest buzzwords and a few VR companies licensed some of id’s games. Nothing had come from that brief foray—either because the VR versions of those games sucked, or because the companies involved wound up going belly-up—but it had now been a couple decades since then, and Carmack was curious to see how much virtual reality had progressed. Surely, he thought, great strides had been made over the past twenty years! Computers, after all, were now hundreds of thousands times faster than they were back then. Not to mention all the progress that had been made with displays, sensors, and other relevant things. But after assessing the HMDs currently on the market, Carmack wasn’t just disappointed by what was out there, he was flat out offended. In fact, with some of the headsets, the latency—meaning the lag between when someone tries to complete an action on-screen (like, say, firing a weapon) and when that action actually occurs—was actually a step back from the systems Ivan Sutherland built back in the ’60s! Granted, those Sutherland systems were ultra-expensive with low-latency CRT displays . . . but still! How could this be? Had VR really flamed out so badly in the ’90s that touching the technology was still perceived as toxic?

  As of late 2011, the most popular HMD was probably eMagin’s Z800 3-D visor, which cost about $900. Lightweight, and with a resolution of 800 x 600, the Z800 was certainly better than anything from the ’90s. But the headset was flimsy, the tracking was lousy, and, worst of all, there was this:

  The field of view was terrible. With a FOV of only 40 degrees, it felt like looking at the world through a toilet paper tube.

  How could a VR experience possibly feel immersive when you feel like you’ve got blinders just outside your eyes? The whole allure of VR was to actually feel present in a different place; and that just wasn’t possible if you had the same FOV as a horse in the Kentucky Derby. This problem was not unique to eMagin’s Z800 3-D visor; in fact that 40° FOV was just about the widest of what was out there.

  Nevertheless, Carmack purchased several of these offensive headsets and spent some time trying to make them better. So Carmack used a “testbed” that he had already coded for unrelated graphics works—which, essentially, was just an playable scene from Rage—to experiment with the parameters of the VR headsets he had acquired. And eventually, he was able to make enough progress with his experiments that he felt what he would excitedly describe to colleagues as a “kernel of awesomeness.” It was hard to put into words exactly what that kernel was, but it had something to do with finally, after all these years, feeling like he had stepped inside one of his creations. But again, with nothing more than a through-toilet-paper-tubes view, this sensation that he felt was barely a kernel.

  So that was a big problem. And so, too, was this: Carmack had allocated only a few weeks toward researching VR and, as the calendar flipped to November, his time was almost up. As id’s technical director, he needed to focus on tangible revenue streams; that is, to continue his current research, even in a minor capacity, he’d need to come up with a business reason to do so. This is how the “marketing gimmick” idea came about.

  The following fall, id Software was planning to release a remastered version of Doom 3, which had originally come out in 2004. This remastered version—which would be called Doom 3: BFG Edition (BFG short for “Big Fucking Gun”)—would, like most rereleases, struggle to earn buzz against a slate of shiny of new games. Unless . . . well, okay: What if, Carmack wondered, we paired Doom 3: BFG Edition with this weird novelty technology that people haven’t really talked about in twenty years? What if, at the year’s biggest trade show (E3), we demoed a virtual reality version of Doom 3 for the press? It was, indeed, a gimmicky idea, but it seemed like an idea that might garner attention for an eight-year-old game.

  This strategy gave Carmack a reason to keep VR on his radar. Now he just needed to find a headset that could deliver an optimal experience. Fortuitously, in November 2011, Sony released a “personal HD & 3-D viewer” that Carmack thought might fit the bill: the HMZ-T1. With cutting-edge OLED display panels, Sony billed the HMZ-T1 as a “wearable HDTV” that gave users “the equivalent of having your very own 150" movie screen just 12 feet away, in either 2D or 3D.”7 And while that may have been cool, it wasn’t particularly useful for what Carmack had in mind. For one thing, the latency was unbearably high; and for another: it didn’t come equipped with a tracking device—meaning a sensor capable of detecting the location of the user’s head (so that—like in real-life—the screen you are watching does not move when you turn your head).

  Nevertheless, a high-def, high-latency 3-D viewer still might have worked well enough for Carmack’s pet project (it was a marketing gimmick, after all); but even for a relatively affordable HMD ($799), there was still a major, experience-killing problem:

  With a 45° FOV, Sony’s HMZ-T1 was only slightly less terrible. The OLED screen made things more compelling, but it still seemed impossible to feel “present.”

  The FOV issue wasn’t really something that Carmack could address. But he could do other things to his game itself—to the source code of Doom 3 BFG—to improve the VR experience of these HMDs. If this sounds counterintuitive at all—using software to improve a hardware experience—an easy way to think about this is with a television and a television program. Without the hardware (the television), you can’t experience the software (the television program). Though much of the hardware experience is based on the quality of the hardware itself (i.e., the television’s display, resolution, features, etc.), there are ways to film or edit the television program so that it optimizes certain aspects on-screen (i.e., clarity, contrast, consistency, etc.). And so with the exception of adding a tracking device to the few headsets that he thought might be decent enough to demo at E3 (this included the headsets from Sony and eMagin), Carmack found time over the next few months to try and make the software side of Doom 3: BFG Edition as “VR-ready” as could be.

  His office, which now resembled a mad scientist’s laboratory—partially dissected headsets everywhere—was proof of this ambition. As E3 approached, he continued to tinker toward something better. One possibility he found online involved using off-the-shelf optics—like a series of wide-angle lenses made by LEEP systems in the ’90s—that, when coupled with an LCD screen, could potentially achieve a wider field of view. Exploring this possibility led Carmack to an enthusiast website called VR-tifacts, specifically an article entitled “LEEP on the Cheap.”8 In the comments section of that article, Carmack read about a hardware hacker who appeared to be doing some very interesting work in this apace. A hacker who went by the name “PalmerTech.”

  FROM: John Carmack

  TO: PalmerTech

  I would be interested in checking out, or buying outright, one of your high FOV prototypes if that is possible. I am going to be doing some private VR demos at E3, and it would be interesting to compare the relative merits of high FOV versus high resolutions versus high refresh rates

  Reading Carmack’s message from inside his messy trailer, Palmer Luckey could hardly believe his eyes. John Carmack, the man who had made several of his favorite games, wanted to borrow something that he had made? Despite a mild temptation to freak out, Luckey reminded himself that when it came to virtual reality headsets, he knew way more than probably anyone in the world—including even Carmack the Magnificent. So, trying not to sound like a drooling fanboy, Luckey replied, “I would be glad to lend or sell you one, whichever you prefer. I have been planning on selling it as a kit starting in June, but I can put one together for you before then . . . Are you interested in the 120-degree prototype or the 270-degree prototype?”

  Now, as surreal as all this felt, it wasn’t as if Luckey thought that this would lead to some sort of life-changing “big break.” Sure, it felt incredible to be able to help out one of his heroes, but, really, what was the best-case scenario here? Probably that (if impressed) Carmack would post a nice review on the forum, which could potentially help Luckey sell a dozen more kits for his headset. And that was an outcome that would have thrilled him, a possibility that motivated him to finalize his plans for the Kickstarter and announce it on MTBS3D. But before doing so, he wanted to make sure that he could rely on the help of a few friends, most of all from Chris Dycus, a skinny, subdued-but-enthusiastic teenager who had been part of ModRetro since the early days and, by this point, was one of Luckey’s best and most trusted friends.