PALMER LUCKEY HAS never used an Oculus Rift.
That’s what the founder of Oculus keeps telling himself as he unboxes the commercial version of the virtual reality system he invented. Opens the package. Takes out the few elements—the headset, the single cable that connects it to a computer, the small cylindrical infrared camera that tracks it in space. Runs through the setup. And finally puts on the headset and takes stock of his surroundings.
Luckey has been doing this same thing over and over and over again, on different computers in different rooms on Facebook’s campus. He’s spent days repeating the sequence, putting himself in the shoes of a customer who has just received a Rift.
That customer could be anyone. Maybe it’s one of the hundreds of thousands of people who bought a developer-only iteration—the Kickstarted version in 2012 or maybe the more refined one that followed two years later. Maybe it’s someone who has spent the last few years with their nose pressed against the digital glass, following every wrinkle of the Rift’s progress on Reddit or podcasts or YouTube or in WIRED or even Oculus’ own lengthy, surprisingly transparent blog posts. Maybe it’s someone who experienced VR only recently, at SXSW or Sundance, and felt in their very marrow that the world was about to change.
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Really, though, it doesn’t matter. After nearly four years of work, Luckey and his colleagues are about to share their long-gestating dream with the world. The Oculus Rift arrives tomorrow, and anyone who finds one on their doorstep must have an absolutely seamless experience. With all the momentum that VR has right now—the millions of people who are aware of it, the billions of dollars poured into it—Luckey would hate to see it stall because of something as pedestrian as a long wait for a driver update. So he opens a box, and he sets up a headset, and then he does it all over again. Because Palmer Luckey has never used an Oculus Rift.
WHEN YOU SET out to create a virtual reality headset, you soon realize that the idea of form following function is bullshit. It’s a reductive canard. Yes, both of those things matter, and the Oculus Rift does need to be both beautiful and powerful, but it’s not something you hold in your hand—it’s something you put on your face. That’s a daunting prospect: Not only are you blind to the world around you, but there’s the whole I-look-nuts thing. (There’s also the whole here-comes-Skynet thing, but on that front we’ve got bigger, Go-playing fish to fry.)
That’s only part of it, though; once you put it on your face, it needs to disappear. It needs to be not just comfortable but light—or at least feel light. After all, it’s less of a window than it is a wormhole; the more you remember it’s there, the less you’re able to lose yourself in everything happening inside it. (And what’s happening inside it is a whole other challenge, one we’ll get to later.)
“You’re never going to stand 10 feet away and say, ‘I love this thing’—it’s a big item on your face,” says Oculus creative director Peter Bristol. “It’s not a focal point; it’s an enabler.”
That’s a consideration that Bristol never dealt with in his first seven years at Carbon Design Group, a Seattle firm that worked on products ranging from medical devices to the Xbox 360 controller. But in 2013, Oculus reached out. The company needed input devices that would go along with the nascent Rift, and it wanted Carbon’s expertise—on both controllers and the headset itself.
Work began—but then a few months later, Carbon principal Willy Stiggelbout called Oculus CEO Brendan Iribe. “We’ve got close to 70 percent of our workforce dedicated to Oculus,” he told Iribe. “If it gets any more than that, we’re in an uncomfortable position.”
“Funny you should ask,” Iribe replied. “We’d like all of them dedicated to the Rift.”
Just as the companies began talking about what that might look like, Facebook bought Oculus for $2 billion. That was in March 2014. “We suddenly had the means and ability to acquire Carbon,” Iribe says now. By that summer, the Carbon team had joined an ever-growing list of companies (at least five at most recent count, specializing in technologies from hand-tracking to room-mapping) that Oculus has added to its roster.
THE FIRST EVIDENCE of Carbon’s influence came before the acquisition, when Oculus released its second developer-only kit. That headset, the DK2, not only added new capabilities—most significantly, the ability to have its position tracked in space and a display technology that kept images clear even when users moved their heads quickly—but, with its rounded corners and smaller, less forbidding eyebox, it was immediately friendlier than its predecessor. “We don’t want the robot mask on your face,” says Nirav Patel, an Oculus engineer who helped design the motion-sensing brain of the Rift. “As we went from DK1 to DK2, we had in mind that we needed to overcorrect for that.”
But the DK2 was by no means perfect. Its ski-goggle-style head strap was soft, but to keep the front-heavy headset stable it had to be adjusted so tightly that long-term comfort was a concern. And cramming in all the capabilities Oculus wanted the consumer Rift to have meant bundling three more cables together, resulting in what Patel calls a “preposterous umbilical cord.” While DK2 did what it needed to do—provide developers a platform on which they could start building games and experiences—it wasn’t a product. Not by a long shot.
So Bristol and Patel and their teams made design prototypes. A lot of them. (At one point, while showing me a group of 10 or so prototypes, Bristol allowed that the assortment represents “probably a fiftieth” of their exploration.) And while all those prototypes solved problems, they invariably created others. Take the one that replaced straps with hard plastic wings that gripped the sides of your head. Upside: You could slide it on from the front. Downside: Not only did the lack of side anchors make the headset shift from side to side, but you felt like Bane during a visit to the optometrist.
“You’re always adding into the equation what people are actually going to be comfortable wearing and what looks appropriate,” Bristol says. “You don’t want to look like you came from some sci-fi movie in the ’70s.”
As the prototypes came and went, the team realized that ergonomics for a VR headset are about more than just stability. You could custom-fit a 3-D-printed headset, but that was for naught if it didn’t lead to a good time in VR. “We’d build stuff,” Patel says, “and we couldn’t actually prove out if it was ergonomically good until we actually went into VR. You have to see it in-experience to know if it solves the problems that you need it to.”
Slowly, the many tributaries they’d pursued dried up, returning them to a single course of design elements. The side straps became spring-loaded cantilevers, which would let you adjust the fit as you liked but still take the headset off (and put it back on) like a baseball cap, with no further readjustments. The integrated on-ear headphones swivel forward and back to fit onto anyone’s ears—then swing up and out of the way with a soft, satisfying click. “The right answer has to be exposed to the consumer,” Bristol says. “You’re not hiding it in plastic or decoration—there’s a raw honesty of technology and solutions.”
Date: March 27, 2016