The new book The History Of The Future is out today in hardcover, ebook and audiobook. The narrative written by Console Wars author Blake Harris charts the 2012 founding of Oculus. Along the way there is an accounting of the $3 billion acquisition by Facebook and $500 million jury decision. The story ends after the 2017 exit of Oculus co-founder Palmer Luckey. Along the way is Chapter 23, titled NINE STORIES. The chapter focuses on developers in April 2013 receiving the first Rift development kit — known as DK1. 56,334 of the headsets would eventually ship out to 114 countries. The nine stories provide an intimate look into how some lives changed with the arrival of that VR headset. Last week, we published a remarkable email referenced in the book originally sent by John Carmack in 2015 to Oculus leaders. The document assesses the group’s strengths and weaknesses with extraordinary detail. This week, we are printing excerpts from Chapter 23. Below are the first four of the nine stories. Check back tomorrow when we excerpt the remaining five stories from Chapter 23 of The History Of The Future. FOUR STORIES April 2013 “Check this out,” Luckey said, showing Dycus an eBay web page littered with results. Skimming the items, Dycus couldn’t help but grin: Oculus’s $300 devkits were in such high demand that some were going for over a thousand bucks. By this point, the first week of April, it was now clear that the launch of DK1 had been an unmitigated success. Secondhand units were selling for three times their price; tech journalists were publishing glowing reviews; and Luckey’s in-box was flooded with affection and admiration—comments like this one, from a Korean fan, proclaiming that Luckey was “going to be a historic human in 21c.” But as cool as all that was, none of it compared to the fact that developers all over the world were starting to receive their devkits in the mail; and over the next few months, these devs would get to work and begin building incredible things . . . 1. JUSTIN MORAVETZ Santa Monica, California In seventh grade, Justin Moravetz and his classmates were asked to give a presentation about “The Future.” So Moravetz decided to talk about the technology that excited him most—virtual reality!—and even cobbled together a makeshift headset using a VGA monitor and two Game Boy Screen Magnifiers. For the next two decades, he waited for VR to finally arrive in all that glory he had imagined as a boy. But year after year yielded disappointment after disappointment. From Forte’s VFX1 to eMagin’s latest Z800 3-DVisor, Justin Moravetz had seen it all. From his experience as a 3-D animator at Sony Computer Entertainment, Moravetz had insight into what a powerhouse was doing with virtual reality. And, well, it wasn’t much. He came to believe that the only way virtual reality could ever really take of would be for a small, scrappy outside force to come in—resurrect the technology from the ashes of its failures—and force big companies (like the one he worked for) to [...] The post Excerpt: Four Stories From Blake Harris Book The History Of The Future appeared first on UploadVR.
Posted on: 19 February 2019 | 6:40 pm