Where's this all going? In the long run, it's immediately obvious, right?
It's virtual reality. It's the ability to feel like you're literally inside
of the video game, to feel like it is reality. And whatever technology makes that
possible, that's clearly where this is all going someday. There's disagreement as
to when, but I don't think anyone would believe, like, oh no, gaming is like
never going to get there. Nobody wants. It's obviously what's going to happen.
That's why it's such a science fiction staple. So I started working on VR when
I was 15 years old. I built my first prototype headset myself
when I was 16 years old. So it took me a while to learn about
VR, to try a bunch of old VR tech. I read a whole bunch of
old patents from the 80s and 90s. I was reading all of these academic
studies about VR. I was reading all these military research papers about
virtual reality. I was just like downloading into my brain everything I could about
what worked, what didn't. Also buying a lot of old hardware. So back then,
old VR headsets were dirt cheap. Cause nobody was collecting them. I was probably the
only guy in the whole world collecting them. So I'm going on ebay and I'm
looking at all of this stuff being sold by like medical facilities shutting down,
that have some headset that was used as part of a research trial in the
late 90s. And like I'm buying this stuff that they bought for literally hundreds of
thousands of dollars for less than $100. I ended up building this like
collection of old hardware and I'm taking it apart, I'm learning from it,
realizing what worked, what didn't. And so when I built my first headset, I called
it PR1 prototype one. And that way it was kind of like I'm putting a
stick in there, like this is the first thing I'm building. It was a wide
field of view virtual reality headset, 3D compatible, but it
also weighed like six or seven pounds. It was this huge helmet that went on
your head. It was so uncomfortable, so ungainly. But it was kind of
the first thing that proved this experience. Like the visual side is
clearly way better than gaming on a monitor. And. And so I kept working on
it, building new prototypes. And then I did that for years. And then when I
was 18 years old, so two, almost three years later,
I had been showing prototypes to my friends for years and they all thought I
was kind of off my rocker, right? Like, I wish I could say my friends
were supportive, but they're not. Every prototype that I had shown him up to,
this one that I made when I was 18 was honestly not very inspiring
unless you could had a really good imagination. You had to imagine what was going
on. And then when I showed it to people and it was the first prototype
that I'd ever shown them where they said, oh shit, I finally get it.
That's when I started Oculus. So I started my company after I showed
it to people and said they finally, instead of saying I don't get it,
they said holy shit, I finally get that this is going somewhere.
And so I started Oculus and ended up doing a Kickstarter
for that and we were really successful. We hit our goal in like two hours
and we ended up making this incredible headset, working with a bunch of
game developers, getting it all out there and of course in the long run ended
up selling that to Facebook for a few billion dollars. That's where I got my.