PALMER LUCKEY

I was interested in virtual reality for several years even before working at USC, it wasn't an interest that started there at all. In fact, when I started working at USC, I already had prototypes of the Rift that were very similar to the final design.

In the past, before phones and the Internet, all communication was face-to-face. Now, most of it is digital, via emails and messaging services. If people were to start using virtual reality, it would almost come full circle.

I'm the most optimistic guy about VR out there. I have crazy visions of what we'll be doing in the future.

Virtual reality is a tough sell for a software developer. They have to convince investors that not only are they going to build a good game, which is what they normally have to do, they have to convince them that it's going to be a good game and that virtual reality will be successful.

A lot of people, even if they know what VR is, see it as this tool to go in your basement and play Halo.

Ever since I was 15, I've tried to act and talk as if I was a public figure because I was sure that I would be one day and wanted to be prepared.

There are times, especially when I was just getting into PC gaming, where I spent way less time playing than obsessing about the quality of the play.

Games take years to make, and it's important that when we launch, it can't just be a great launch catalog and then a desert for a really long time. To be honest, for a lot of developers, they'd rather not be competing at launch with all this other software.

I started attending community college when I was 14 or 15, just doing general education stuff like history and mathematics. Then I went on to California State University Long Beach to pursue a degree in journalism. And then I ended up dropping out to found Oculus.

I'm a huge fan of online communities. I think that asynchronous internet-based communication forums such as Reddit and other discussion forums are one of the best things that could possibly have happened to collaborative invention. The Rift certainly would not exist without forums.

I'm a huge gamer. I'm very excited, and the idea of the Rift was as a headset that was designed around the specific uses of VR gaming. But I'm excited about a lot of stuff that's outside of it, because I was a VR enthusiast. I want VR to be the thing that we all live in, that we all use for everything, not just games.

I'm really familiar with what Cardboard's doing; it's not a novel concept. Cardboard is in many ways a direct ripoff of FOV2GO, a project I helped work on when I was at ICT, and it was fairly well known in the academic VR community.

I've been a bit of an electronics enthusiast and maker for a long time. I actually started the forum called ModRetro. It's an electronics enthusiast community that focuses on modifying vintage game consoles, and it's actually one of the larger game console modification forums on the Internet.

If I grew up in 'da hood,' it would make my story so much more interesting - if I had something to escape from. I had a pretty good life. My parents weren't rich; they weren't poor. I wasn't trying to escape from anything. It was always just the pursuit of something cooler.

The Oculus Studio stuff is going to remain exclusive to the Oculus store and platform. That's not to say that you'll never be able to play it on other hardware, but it very much is exclusive to the Oculus platform.

Virtual reality is inevitably going to become mainstream - it's only a question of how good it needs to be before the mainstream is willing to use it.

VR is going to become something mainstream, but it's not going to happen right away. You just don't have the horsepower to make it happen on a device, much less a cheap enough and comfortable enough device that a normal consumer is going to want to have.

I wanted to play games in the best way possible, a way that was better than anyone else would have access to. As time went on, it became clear that VR was actually feasible on a large scale at a low cost, and at a quality far beyond what I had been hoping for.

Don't be afraid to convince yourself that your business is incredible, but don't expect others to be convinced without solid data to back it up. Ideas can be a worth a lot, but they are usually not. Execution is everything.

I don't think that VR is going to lead to humanity being enslaved in the matrix or letting the world crumble around us. I think it's going to end up being a great technology that brings closer people together, that allows for better communication, that reduces a lot of environmental waste that we're currently doing in the real world.

Any real virtual reality enthusiast can look back at VR science fiction. It's not about playing games... 'The Matrix,' 'Snow Crash,' all this fiction was not about sitting in a room playing video games. It's about being in a parallel digital world that exists alongside our own, communicating with other people, playing with other people.

I don't think that technology is going to allow for greater subjugation of people. I think it's gonna give them more freedom.

If you're having a very high-adrenaline, high-movement experience in virtual reality, and then all of a sudden you're back in your office, that disconnect is pretty notable. Whereas if you're using it for virtual reality teleconferencing... there's really no kind of impact moving back and forth between the real and the virtual world.

It's going to be so obvious when something isn't well made for VR. People are going to use the best VR content. That's the stuff that's going to get shown to people. That's the stuff that's going to get demoed. That's most of what people are going to buy.

The Arab Spring is kind of a perfect model for how people are going to use technology to act collectively in their own interest in the future. There's never been a revolution that was coordinated by social media to the degree that the Arab Spring was.