VR headsets Archives

Valve is a critical player in the modern resurgence of VR. They are known for their friendly competitions and cooperation they had with Oculus in the early days of virtual reality spanning from July 2012 to March 20113. Blake Harris’ History of the Future does a great job of laying down a initial timeline (albeit without complete citations as well as an unknown amount of dramatization), but in my interview with Harris he also shared with me beyond very limited conversations with Valve’s Joe Ludwig and Alan Yates, he didn’t have any conversations with any current Valve employees. The only Valve representatives he was able to talk with were former Valve folks who left to work at Oculus. Harris had access to some e-mail correspondence between Oculus and Valve, but in the absence of Valve’s participation, the overall perspective captured in Harris’ book is heavily influenced by Facebook’s side of the story.

On Monday, May 23, 2016, Valve’s Alan Yates responded to a thread on Reddit titled “Oculus becoming bad for VR industry?” after Revive stopped working after an Oculus Update. Responding to eposnix’s comment that “Competition drives innovation and [the Oculus Rift is] the only reason the Vive has its feature set to begin with.” Yates chimed in to say,

While that is generally true in this case every core feature of both the Rift and Vive HMDs are directly derived from Valve’s research program. Oculus has their own [Computer Vision]-based tracking implementation and frensel lens design but the [Oculus Rift Consumer Version #1] is otherwise a direct copy of the architecture of the 1080p Steam Sight prototype Valve lent Oculus when we installed a copy of the “Valve Room” at their headquarters. I would call Oculus the first SteamVR licensee, but history will likely record a somewhat different term for it…

For me, this was a pretty explosive allegation, and on May 24, 2016 UploadVR’s Ian Hamilton wrote a piece called “Inside The Growing Rift Between Valve And Oculus” where he shows an image of Mark Zuckerberg trying out the Valve Room demo in Oculus’ offices on January 29, 2014 — just 55 days before Facebook’s deal to acquire Oculus was announced on March 25, 2014.

This blurry photo of a @brendaniribe presentation shows Zuckerberg trying "Valve prototype" before buying @oculus. pic.twitter.com/lFrm8ZrvY5

— Ian Hamilton (@hmltn) February 26, 2015

Did Zuckerberg know that he was demoing Valve’s technology here? Did the investors from Andreessen Horowitz know that they were trying out some of Valve’s technology when they came to demo the Valve Room demo at Oculus’ offices in Irvine, CA? Blake Harris reports in History of the Future that on October 31, 2013 Marc Andreessen, Chris Dixon, Brian Cho & Gil Shafir “visited Irvine to check out the progress of Oculus. And over the course of several hours, the folks from Andreessen Horowitz found themselves quite impressed.”

Iribe was able to experience VR without any motion sickness after seeing the Valve Room demo at Valve’s offices in Bellvue, WA in September 2013. He was in the process of trying to raise a Series B round in his talk at the Gamer Insider Summit on October 17, 2013 where IGN reported that he said,

“I’ve gotten sick every time I’ve tried [Rift],” Iribe said. He stated that, after just a couple minutes, he feels ill and tends to stop using his company’s own device. “In the last couple weeks, I’ve tried a prototype internally where I did not get sick for the first time, and I stayed in there for 45 minutes.”

Again, it’s unclear under which contexts Iribe was sharing with people that this breakthrough “internal prototype” was actually Valve’s technology. Whether it was disclosed or not may be a moot point now, but what’s important is that Valve has been a crucial driver of innovation in VR, even to this day. However, Valve is a private company in every meaning of the word, and they have not talked much publicly about some of this history, especially when it comes to their past relationship with Oculus.

Valve News Network’s Tyler McVicker has been reporting on Valve for over 10 years now as a fan / investigative journalist / archivist / historian / digital archeologist. He’s got some deep insights into the history of the projects Valve has been working on, the culture of the company, and what motivating Valve to get into VR in the first place. So I wanted to talk to McVicker to get some deeper context on Valve, why they’re so hard to communicate with (he referred to this Steam Dev Days talk by Robin Walker which comprehensively explains Valve’s philosophy when it comes to “external communication”), how he’s able to break stories about Valve by hacking into game patches and Source 2 function calls, what he thinks happened between Valve and Oculus, why he thinks Abrash is the bad guy in this story, and some more about his personal experiences with Half-Life: Alyx, and the underlying motivations for why he does what he does in covering Valve.

LISTEN TO THIS EPISODE OF THE VOICES OF VR PODCAST

TIMELINE OF VALVE’S COLLABORATION WITH OCULUS + VR Events

After I interviewed McVicker, I went through Harris’ History of the Future to record a specific timeline of the relationship between Oculus and Valve. Harris told me in my interview with him that he had to cut out a lot of information about the relationship between Oculus and Valve due to space considerations, but there’s actually a lot that’s on the public record about the cooperation and collaboration between Oculus and Valve. I didn’t buy my Oculus DK1 until January 1, 2014, and so I was not observing in real-time what was happening with VR between August 2012 and December 2013.

At GDC 2015, Valve was showing off the HTC Vive room-scale VR demos to developers and VIPs in the gaming industry. I was not able to get a demo slot at the time, but I was able to sneak in behind the scenes and take some photos of this mini museum that they had set up.

My full Twitter thread of these photos is here, and the dates are from Road to VR’s coverage who were able to get more dates at the time.

A 16-part visual history of @SteamVR Vive.
Original fiducial-based positional tracking used April Tag format, 1/16 pic.twitter.com/Mts7eUXrFQ

— Kent Bye VoicesOfVR (@kentbye) March 10, 2015

Fiducial-based Positional Tracking – May 2012

Telescope Low-Persistence Prototype – January 2013

First Low-Persistence AMOLED Panel – January 2013

Team Fortress 2 “VR Mode” Shipped – March 2013

Early Low-Persistence Headset – April 2013

Early Laser Tracking System – September 2013
“The Room” Demo – September 2013

Desktop Dot Tracking and Controllers – October 2013

Steam VR Arrives and “The Room” Demo’d to Public – January 2014

First Laser Tracked Headset – May 2014

First Laser-Tracked Input – October 2014

V minus-1 Headset – November 2014

VR Controller Prototype – December 2014

Miniaturized Laser Base Station – February 2015

HTC Vive Dev Headset – March 2015

NOTE: I originally posted this timeline on August 28, 2020, but I will be updating it as I find more information and context.

July 26-27, 2012
Oculus’ Palmer Luckey & Michael Antonov go to Valve to meet with Michael Abrash and Gabe Newell and show them an early Oculus Rift Prototype in order to get a quote for their Kickstarter Video.
(History of the Future, pg 114-129)

Late July 2012
Days before Oculus Kickstarter Launch, Valve’s Michael Abrash & Gabe Newell submit video testimony for the Oculus Kickstarter pitch video.
(History of the Future, pg 133)

Aug. 01, 2012
Oculus Kickstarter launches
Archival link of first day: https://web.archive.org/web/20120801212942/https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1523379957/oculus-rift-step-into-the-game
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1523379957/oculus-rift-step-into-the-game

12:14 PM · Aug 1, 2012
First Oculus Tweet from @Oculus3D

We've reached Kickstarter our goal in our very first day! Thank you all for the support!

— Oculus (@oculus) August 1, 2012

August 2, 2012
Thank you!
First blog post from Oculus after reaching their Kickstarter goal
https://www.oculus.com/blog/thank-you/

5:50 PM · August 2, 2012

Wow– We've reached $1 million in less than 36 hours! Thank you so much for your support.

— Oculus (@oculus) August 3, 2012

August 3, 2012
“Virtual Insanity” QuakeCon 2012 Panel featuring Oculus’ Palmer Luckey, Valve’s Michael Abrash, & id’s John Carmack. Within 18 months they’ll all be working at Oculus.
Abrash originally started with AR, but says that VR is here now and VR is a subset of AR. Abrash also announces that Valve is “doing in R&D into VR & AR at Valve.”
YouTube Video posted Aug 5, 2012

August 9, 2012
Quakecon Recap and Rift News from Oculus’ blog
https://www.oculus.com/blog/quakecon-recap-and-rift-news/

August 10, 2012
Virtual Insanity at QuakeCon blog post from Michael Abrash on Valve’s site:

I should have posted this sooner, but it’s been a little crazy. It was a blast getting up on the stage with John and Palmer and talking about VR, but it was more as well. As I said during the panel, it felt like this might be one of those seminal moments when the world changes, the point at which a new technology that will change our lives started down the runway for takeoff. Of course, it’s entirely possible that that won’t happen, but it feels like the pieces are falling into place: affordable, wide-field-of-view, lightweight HMDs that can deliver a great experience; inexpensive tracking (cameras, gyros, accelerometers, magnetometers); and, critically, an existing software ecosystem – first-person shooters – that can readily move to VR (although that’s just a start; many other experiences more uniquely suited to VR will emerge once VR is established as a viable consumer technology). VR can only take off if all three pieces are working well, and we’re getting close on all three fronts. I don’t think we’re quite there yet, but the remaining issues seem solvable with time and attention, and once they’re solved, we may be off on a long, transformative journey. Where that ends, I have no idea, but I’m looking forward to the ride – and I think it might have started at QuakeCon.

https://web.archive.org/web/20120914002335/https://blogs.valvesoftware.com/abrash/virtual-insanity-at-quakecon/

August 14, 2012
Oculus press release
“Former Gaikai and Scaleform Officer, Brendan Iribe, Joins Oculus as CEO”
Both Iribe and Antanov were seed investors of Oculus and technically already co-founders, but this was announced during the Kickstarter campaign and before Iribe had left his previous job.
https://web.archive.org/web/20120818143925/http://oculusvr.com/press_release_081412/

October 2012
Two members of Valve’s AR/VR team Joe Ludwig & Tom Forsyth start to port over Team Fortress 2 over to VR. “What they wanted to do was port an existing Valve game to work in VR.” It’d be cool, but “it would be a great learning experience in what works, and what does not, in current VR.”
(History of the Future, pg 220-221)

[NOTE: At GDC 2013, Ludwig says they used a NVis ST-50 and a Rift Prototype for testing and development. It’s unclear when Valve got their first Rift prototype. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gpr0FE2ATaY?t=85]

Jan 6, 2013
Oculus PR reps Jim Redner & Eric Schumacher start bringing journalists to their Venetian hotel room for the Oculus CES 2013 demos.
(History of the Future, pg 210)

By the end of CES, Oculus had won a ton of awards at CES 2013 without even having a spot on the showroom floor. They’d be able to raise a $16M Series A round later in the year.
The Verge – Best in Show, Best in Gaming, Reader’s Choice
IGN – Best Prototype
Wired – Best of CES
Laptop Magazine – Best Gaming Device
PCMag – Best Gaming Gear
GameFront – Best of CES
https://www.oculus.com/blog/oculus-rift-at-ces-2013-recap/

Jan 8, 2013
Valve starts to promote early hardware experiments at CES 2013.
The Verge: Valve’s Steam Box gets big push at CES as Gabe Newell meets with major hardware partners
https://www.theverge.com/2013/1/8/3851740/steam-box-inches-closer-to-reality-ces-gabe-newell

Jan 8 2013
Gabe at CES talks about some of Valve’s hardware efforts saying to the Verge: “You can always sell the Best box.”
Valve News Network’s Tyler McVicker says that Valve as a company likes to create the absolute best technology and experiences that they can.
Exclusive interview: Valve’s Gabe Newell on Steam Box, biometrics, and the future of gaming
https://www.theverge.com/2013/1/8/3852144/gabe-newell-interview-steam-box-future-of-gaming

January 2013
Oculus’ COO Malamed calculates with the burndown that they’ll run out of money in 6 months from the $2.5M seed investment + $2.5M Kickstarter money, and this catalyzes Oculus CEO & seed investor Brendan Iribe to start fundraising VC money.
(History of the Future, pg 249)

February 11, 2013
Luckey, Iribe, Patel visit Valve
Valve’s Joe Ludwig & Michael Abrash will be presenting at GDC 2013 to communicate that developing for VR is hard.
Again, it’s unclear when Valve first received a Rift Prototype to do the TF 2 port, which started in October.
Antonov, Mitchell, & Luckey were also presenting at GDC 2013
(History of the Future, pg 250)

Feb 12, 2013
Valve’s Jeri Ellsworth was working on AR at Valve when she was suddenly fired, as well as 25-30% of Valve’s staff are laid off.

Wow. I suddenly have a lot of spare time.

— Jeri Ellsworth (@jeriellsworth) February 13, 2013

(History of the Future, pg 250)

March 8 2013
Brenan Iribe is raising money and pitched Chris Dixon from Andreessen Horowitz.
(History of the Future, pg 258)

March 11 2013
Iribe pitched Marc Andreessen directly, who asked him, “How long do you think it’s going to take you to solve motion sickness?”
Iribe didn’t know, and Andreessen Horowitz passes on investing in their Series A. They may be interested again if Oculus ever finds a viable solution for VR motion sickness.
(History of the Future, pg 258)

March 18, 2013
Announcement of Team Fortress 2 will have a new “VR Mode” that “supports the Oculus Rift, available this week!”
https://www.oculus.com/blog/team-fortress-2-in-the-oculus-rift/?locale=en_US

March 18, 2013
Article in Engadget “Valve’s Joe Ludwig on the uncertain future of virtual reality and partnering with Oculus”

[Reporter Ben Gilbert is] “the first anyone outside of Valve will see of the company’s VR efforts thus far.” Ludwig says, “We think that both augmented and virtual reality are going to be a huge deal over the next several years.”

Regarding Oculus: “We’re friends. They help us out with hardware and we help them out with software,” Ludwig says.

“No money changed hands; Oculus provided development kits, and Valve’s providing Team Fortress 2′s VR Mode. The casual nature of that relationship is reflected in Valve’s attitude about releasing the new mode — Team Fortress 2′s VR-enabling update in the coming weeks is essentially a giant beta test in which Valve will measure and analyze the way TF2 players interact with virtual reality hardware.”

“We don’t have any hardware,” Ludwig says when asked about working with Oculus and why Valve didn’t create its own VR headset. “We’ve done a bunch of experiments with various bits of hardware, but we don’t have a display that we can ship. Oculus is actually out there doing this, and so we’re partnering with them because they have the hardware and we have the software and we can help each other out. And we can both learn a lot in the process.”

https://www.engadget.com/2013-03-18-valve-joe-ludwig-interview.html

March 20, 2013

VR @TeamFortress 2 update now live on @steam_games! http://t.co/x0aa15Qzbk… Make sure to add " -vr" to the command line to enable VR mode!

— Oculus (@oculus) March 20, 2013

Mar 21, 2013
Oculus Rift Development Kit Unboxing

March 26, 2013
Oculus blog: “Valve announced the new “VR Mode” for Team Fortress 2 last week and we brought the latest Oculus-ready build of the war-themed hat simulator with us to GDC. One of the coolest looking games in Valve’s arsenal, the feeling of actually being Heavy, looking down and seeing the mini-gun in your hands, is worth the trip alone.”

They also promote two of Valve’s GDC talks: “Valve is also giving two talks on virtual reality you won’t want to miss”
https://www.oculus.com/blog/oculus-at-gdc-2013/

March 27, 2013
“Running the VR Gauntlet – VR Ready, Are You?” with Michael and Nate
Wednesday, March 27 @ 2:00PM – 3:00PM (Room 302, South Hall)
Mitchell mentions Valve’s TF 2 Demo at Oculus’ GDC Booth, but also demoing Hawking Mech game.

March 28, 2013
“Virtual Reality: The Holy Grail of Gaming” with Palmer and Brendan
Thursday, March 28 @ 11:30AM – 12:30PM (Room 301, South Hall)
Oculus VR @ GDC 2013: Q&A with Palmer Luckey
[posted April 17, 2013]

March 28, 2013
“Why Virtual Reality Is Hard (And Where It Might Be Going)” presented by Michael Abrash
Thursday, March 28 @ 5:30PM – 5:55PM (Room 2014, West Hall)

March 28, 2013
“What We Learned Porting Team Fortress 2 to Virtual Reality” presented by Joe Ludwig
Thursday, March 28 @ 6:05PM – 6:30PM (Room 2014, West Hall)
Developed TF 2 using the Nvis ST-50 & Rift Prototype HMD
NDI Tracker cost $40,000. at (~30min) 1/10 mm accuracy 300 Hz

March 29, 2013

And so it begins: Oculus Rift Development Kits are officially shipping! Read all the details here: http://t.co/wJnXv8ekaJ

— Oculus (@oculus) March 29, 2013

After May 7, 2013
Recently fired Valve employee Jeri Ellsworth tells Luckey & Patel she’s starting Technical Illusions rather than come work at Oculus.
(History of the Future, pg 288)

6:38 PM · May 9, 2013

It's OFFICIAL. Big thanks to #valve@joeludwig for Half Life 2 VR Beta support! #HL2#oculushttps://t.co/biaUtnLEt6

— Oculus (@oculus) May 10, 2013

May 16, 2013
Valve’s Joe Ludwig IGNITE TALK in Seattle: The second coming of Virtual Reality

May 22, 2013

I joined Oculus! http://t.co/OJCuUpPpLu

— Tom Forsyth (@tom_forsyth) May 22, 2013

Announcing Valve’s Tom Forsyth left Valve to work for Oculus
https://www.oculus.com/blog/meet-tom-forsyth-and-steve-lavalle-science-blog-nates-talk-at-gdc-and-unity-trial-extensions/

Forsyth on why he left Valve:
“Because when it’s all said and done,” Forsyth explained, “I just… I like shipping stuff… But the real big payoff is seeing people use you thing. And being a graphics engine person, my job is to bring a fake world into realization. I enjoy watching people use my stuff.”
(History of the Future, pg 292-293)

May 30, 2013
Oculus VR @ GDC 2013: Behind the Scenes

June 17, 2013
Oculus announces series A funding of $16 million
Oculus VR says plans won’t change, as it raises $16 million in venture capital for its virtual reality dreams
https://www.theverge.com/2013/6/17/4439608/oculus-series-a-funding-15-million/in/3631187

June 21 2013
Email from Carmack starts official negotiations for him to join as Oculus CTO.
(History of the Future, pg 297)

July 2013
Iribe & Patel travel to Korea, and showed off “something that ‘shouldn’t work’: a 90 Hz Samsung phone that Valve’s Monty Goodson had hacked to get workin in low-persistence mode” as a proof of concept that Goodson wanted Iribe to show to Samsung.
(History of the Future, pg 299)

August 7 2013
Oculus blog: John Carmack Joins Oculus as CTO announced

Carmack says: “I have fond memories of the development work that led to a lot of great things in modern gaming – the intensity of the first person experience, LAN and internet play, game mods, and so on. Duct taping a strap and hot gluing sensors onto Palmer’s early prototype Rift and writing the code to drive it ranks right up there. Now is a special time. I believe that VR will have a huge impact in the coming years, but everyone working today is a pioneer. The paradigms that everyone will take for granted in the future are being figured out today; probably by people reading this message. It’s certainly not there yet. There is a lot more work to do, and there are problems we don’t even know about that will need to be solved, but I am eager to work on them. It’s going to be awesome!”

https://www.oculus.com/blog/john-carmack-joins-oculus-as-cto/

September 2013
Abrash tells Iribe “we have somethin in the office at Valve that you’re gonna want to see…”
Iribe goes up to Valve to see the Valve Room demo, at the time they were calling it AtmanVR (by Atman Binstock).
Iribe was in VR for 30-45 minutes and he didn’t get motion sickness, and he’d start raving about his experience of presence.
(History of the Future, pg 307-310)

September 2013
Abrash offered to give Iribe a ride to the airport after seeing the Valve Room demo, which would “give him some one-on-one time to take Abrash’s pulse about maybe leaving Valve and coming up to work at Oculus. Over the past year, Iribe had half-heartedly floated the idea on several occasions.” Iribe tells Abrash that he needs him and Binstock at Oculus. “I need both of you guys at Oculus championing this thing with me. So what will it take to make that happen?”
[Apparently, Iribe had already been trying to poach Abrash for a while. It'd take another 6 months or so for him to be successfull.]
(History of the Future, pg 309)

September 2013
Abrash was not interested in making a move “at this time” and tells Iribe, “You know, Brendan, I think the company that’s going to make VR really successful is going to be a big company. Because the capital that’s going to be required to do the custom displays, the custom hardware, the custom sensor systems, and all this work – to build out the full headset – it’s going to be very expensive to really do this right.”
(History of the Future, pg 310)

September 2013
Abrash told Iribe that Microsoft had been spending hundreds of millions of dollars, perhaps billions, on HoloLens, and it “wouldn’t even be consumer ready for years!”
[NOTE: HoloLens wasn't publicly announced until January 21, 2015, and when Abrash was asked directly during Quakecon if major companies where working on developing AR/VR platforms he simply said that major companies will be interested in it.]
(History of the Future, pg 310)

September 2013
Iribe gets back to Oculus and emails the exec team about “Valve’s Holy Grail” – created a VR experience with “zero simulator sickness” “I’d like a group of us to visit Valve and experience the demo first hand.”
(History of the Future, pg 311)

October 2, 2013
Iribe proposes a tech trade to Abrash & Binstock: “We can send over single 120 Hz and dual 90 Hz samples, dev boards with screens, and our screens for the Note 3 driver” in exchange for “one of Atman’s VR room demos.”
(History of the Future, pg 312)

~October 3, 2013
Iribe hears back from Abrash about the tech trade. “Abrash thought the trade he had offered with regard to the Note 3. Abash thought this could work, but also wanted similar assets for Samsung’s S4. Iribe was amenable to that. Over the next week, Iribe and Abrash negotiated a trade. Valve — after signing an NDA with Samsung — would get Oculus’ driver specs and datasheets for the Note 3 and S4; and in exchange, someone from Valve would head down to Oculus and install their “VR Room.”
(History of the Future, pg 313)

October 9, 2013
Internal Oculus Iribe email to former Valve employee Forsyth regarding VR tracking systems: “nothing I’ve seen works nearly as well as what I saw at Valve and we simply don’t seem to have the bandwidth to get it there.” Forsyth pushes back on Iribe saying, “We need to strike a balance somewhere between our mad rush to ship something and Valve’s mad rush to never ship anything ever.”
(History of the Future, pg 314)

October 17, 2013
On October 17, Iribe is so excited about the Valve Room demo that he talks about during a talk during the Games Insider Summit. He describes the tech as “a prototype internally” implying that it’s Oculus technology developed in-house.
“I’ve gotten sick every time I’ve tried [Rift],” Iribe said. He stated that, after just a couple minutes, he feels ill and tends to stop using his company’s own device. “In the last couple weeks, I’ve tried a prototype internally where I did not get sick for the first time, and I stayed in there for 45 minutes.”
Oculus: Motion-Sickness is Solved, 4K ‘Not Far Away’
https://www.ign.com/articles/2013/10/18/oculus-motion-sickness-is-solved-4k-not-far-away

October 17, 2013
Again, either the news org isn’t providing enough context or Iribe was deliberately being oblique.
“In fact, even he gets sick when he uses it, though he says it’s getting much better as they work on it. With the newest update to the headset, he says he’s finally getting to be able to use it.”
“I was able to stay in it for 45 minutes,” he said. “Usually I can’t stay in it for more than two minutes.”
CEO Promises Oculus Rift Won’t Make You Sick
https://www.forbes.com/sites/davidthier/2013/10/17/ceo-promises-oculus-rift-wont-make-you-sick/#257556039715

October 17, 2013
After he gave his Gamer Insider Summit speach claiming that motion sickness has been solved, “as soon as Iribe stepped off the stage and turned on his phone: he received a message from Brian Cho, one of the partners at Andreessen Horowitz.”
“Cho was at the Summit and had been intrigued by Iribe’s talk. If motion sickness had really been solved, then perhaps Andreessen Horowitz could play a role in Oculus’ series B.”
“Shortly after receiving Cho’s email, Iribe wrote back to say, ‘We have a new prototype in the office which you guys really need to see. It ties everything together for a comfortable experience that proves VR is very close to mass market ready.’ From there, Iribe reconnected with Chris Dixon and then directly with Andreessen, who replied: “We’re ready to engage.”
[Note: Again, unclear as to whether or not these investors know that some of it is not their tech.]
(History of the Future, pg 316-317)

~October 2013
Binstock installed a setup of Valve’s VR room demo in an empty office at Oculus HQ in Irvine, CA with QR-code fiducial markers “By the end of the day, installation of this demo was complete. And though, going forward, guests to Oculus HQ would be given tours of what they were told was called the Valve Room…” but also internally referred to as “Temple of the Shitting Bird.”
(History of the Future, pg 317-318)

October 31, 2013
Marc Andreessen, Chris Dixon, Brian Cho & Gil Shafir “visited Irvine to check out the progress of Oculus. And over the course of several hours, the folks from Andreessen Horowitz found themselves quite impressed.”
(History of the Future, pg 319)

Dixon would later cite five reasons why Andreessen Horowitz invested in Oculus:

• the technology
• the quality of the team
• the hand-controller prototypes Luckey had been working on
• an hour-plus meeting with Carmack
• a demo of the Valve Room

(History of the Future but no specific citation provided by Harris, pg 319)

“We are fully converted believers,” Andreessen emailed Iribe.
[Their concerns over motion sickness in VR where alleviated once seeing the Valve Room's proof of concept, but again, did they know some of it wasn't their tech?]
(History of the Future, pg 319)

November 5, 2013
Andreessen emails Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg – “Have you seen Oculus?… Blew my mind wide open.” After talking to Oculus CTO Carmack he thought, “I wanted to just give all my money to him on the spot.”
Dixon tells Iribe that want to “correct that mistake” of passing the first time, and led a $75M Series B funding round.
(History of the Future, pg 319)

Nov 19, 2013
Andreessen put Zuckerberg in touch with Iribe. Short call between Iribe and Zuckerberg asking about the “killer app?” Iribe says gaming & communication.
(History of the Future, pg 319)

Late 2013
Valve and Oculus pushed each other to innovate on tracking: “many at Oculus relished the chance to go head-to-head with Valve. And that chance came in late 2013 when – in a series of meetups that Nirav Patal affectionaly dubbed “bake-offs” — the two companies compared positional tracking systems.”
Oculus DovTrack vs Valve’s ProTrack.
“The net result: by almost every relvant metric (i.e., distance, precision, FOV), Oculus’s DovTrack was the winner.”
(History of the Future, pg 321)

Dec 12, 2013
Oculus raises $75 million to jump-start the virtual reality business [with Andreessen Horowitz leading the investment.]
https://www.theverge.com/2013/12/12/5205852/oculus-raises-75-million-to-jumpstart-the-virtual-reality-business

Late 2013
Former Linden Lab CTO Cory Ondrejka worked at Facebook and knew Andreessen, and asked “if he should go chat with the guys at Oculus.” Reply was “Yeah… You should definitely meet Brendan.” He got in touch, and made plans to visit Irvine to see the Valve Room demo.
(History of the Future, pg 322)

January 15, 2014
3:00p: Robin Walker “Community and Communication in Games-As-Services (Steam Dev Days 2014)”
Recommended by Valve News Network’s Tyler McVicker, this Steam Dev Days presentation by Robin Walker does an amazing job describing Steam’s philosophy of communication focused primarily on their customers of gamers.

Jan 16 2014
3:00 to 3:30p: Michael Abrash “What VR Could, Should, and Almost Certainly Will Be Within Two Years”
PDF: http://media.steampowered.com/apps/abrashblog/Abrash%20Dev%20Days%202014.pdf
Abrash spoke about the need to share technologies with other companies:

Abrash: “Valve’s goal is to enable great VR for the PC. So we’ve shared what we’ve learned through our R&D with Oculus. We’ve shown them our prototypes and demos. We’ve explained how our hardware works. And we’ve provided them with feedback on their hardware design. By showing them a prototype with low persistence, we convinced them of it’s importance. And the lack of blur in Crystal Cove is a direct result of that. We’ve collaborated with them on tracking as well. And we’re continuing to work with them to improve tracking, displays, lenses, and calibration. And we’re excited about where they’re headed.”

Jan 16 2014
3:30 to 4:00p: Palmer Luckey “Porting Games to Virtual Reality” at Steam Dev Days on
Luckey says, “Some of you might have already seen Valve’s VR demo… and it’s probably the best consumer virtual reality system in the world right now.”

[NOTE: Valve News Network: “All You Need to Know on Valve Index” released on Jun 5, 2019 recounts some of this Valve VR hardware history: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xJ1jyNF0cR0]

January 16, 2014
4:30p: “Virtual Reality and Steam” talk at Steam Dev Days by Joe Ludwig

Joe Ludwig announces Steam VR API during his Steam Dev Days talk, which apparently upset Oculus. According to the dramatized account in History of the Future, Oculus says that Valve was saying to developers “Why write your game for Oculus when you can just use our platform instead?” Oculus wasn’t happy. “It was as if they had spent the last eighteen months creating a toolkit, and now Valve was essentially offering a toolkit of toolkits.”
(History of the Future pg 326)

~January 2014
After Ondrejka sees the room demo at Oculus HQ in Irvine, he tells Zuckerberg, “Their current tech is the best I’ve seen by quite a bit. But you have to actually go down and see the Room demo they have in Irvine.”
“Zuckerberg was intrigued… but still not enough to rearrange his schedule.”
[The fidicial markers and calibration of the Room demo makes it impossible to travel around easily, and so Zuckerberg is opting for a demo of the DK2 precursor of the Crystal Cove prototype that won so many awards at CES 2013.]
(History of the Future, pg 326)

January 23, 2014
Iribe flys to Menlo Park to demo the Crystal Cove VR HMD to Mark Zuckerberg, Ondrejka, FB CTO Mike “Schrep” Schroepfer, and FB VP of Product Chris Cox.

Ondrejka says, “And if you liked that, you gotta get down to Irvine and go check out ‘the Room’ demo.”
“Zuckerberg agreed it was important that he make time to visit soon.”
(History of the Future, pg 326-327)

January 29, 2014
Zuckerberg visits Oculus Headquarters in Irvine, CA.
“With limited time, Zuckerberg demoed the Room, checked out some prototypes of DK2.”
[Again, it's unclear as to whether it was disclosed that the Room demo was Valve's technology or not.]
(History of the Future, pg 328-329)

January 30, 2014
Iribe dinner with Zuckerberg who “elevated the conversation from collaboration to acquisition”
(History of the Future, pg 329)

January 30-31, 2014
Oculus execs deliberated and initially “didn’t have much interest in selling the company,” but then over the next couple of days they were open to the idea if the price was right.
(History of the Future, pg 331)

February 2, 2014
Iribe tells the board “We told them we’d rather build than sell unless it was for 4 [billion]. Pretty sure they’ll pass for now.”
(History of the Future, pg 331)

Feb 1, 2014
Zuckerberg email “I’m disappointed the conversation with your investors has increased your price expectations to a point where it may not make sense to discuss futher.”
(History of the Future, pg 332)

Feb 15, 2014
Zuckerberg tries the VR demos at Stanford’s Virtual Human Interaction Lab with Jeremy Bailenson, and then texts Amin Zoufonoun “I just went to this VR lab at Stanford and it was totally awesome. It also confirmed to me that Oculus is miles ahead of everyone else…”

[Again, it's not clear as to whether or not Zuckerberg knew that the Room demo he experienced in Irvine was Valve's technology and not Oculus' when he allegedly says this.]
(History of the Future, pg 333)

~February 2014
Iribe and Mitchell travel to Bellevue, WA to visit Valve’s Abrash & Binstock. “Over the next couple of hours, Iribe and Mitchell pitched the deal hard [for them to come join Oculus], offering equity, autonomy, and the chance to actually ship an incredible product.” They couldn’t convince either of them, and “So, not long after, Iribe decided it was time to call in some reinforcements. Chris Dixon and Marc Andreessen… They flew up and helped Iribe and Mitchell make Oculus’s case over a meeting with Abrash and Binstock at the Seattle Hyatt.”
Again, neither Abrash or Binstock decided to join Oculus yet.
(History of the Future, pg 334-335)

~February / March 2014
“Meanwhile, Abrash and Binstock were increasingly feeling like they were wasting their time at Valve. They both appreciated the freedom that the company had given them to explore virtual reality, but as each became more invested in this technology, it was harder to ignore the fact that this investment did not seem mutual. That, financially speaking, Valve just wasn’t willing to commit much to VR. And after about 18 months of working with this technology, Abrash and Binstock felt like Valve was perpetually dithering and it was time for them to piss or get off the pot.”
(History of the Future, pg 342-343)

First week of March 2014
Abrash and Binstock spent the first week of March meeting with Gabe Newell and Valve’s board of directors to find out if Valve wanted to actively “push forward a VR revolution” and to get some “assurance that this work they had been doing was headed somewhere.”
(History of the Future, pg 343)

Second week of March 2014
“The following week, in a surprise to most, Atman Binstock decided to leave Valve and accept Iribe’s offer to join Oculus.”
Binstock says “Valve is like this jolly fat man who just keeps getting more money and jollier but isn’t willing to take any risks. They aren’t pushing for VR to happen; in fact, I’m not even sure if they care at all whether VR succeeds or fails. Whereas Oculus is different. Oculus is this rocket that is either going to deliver VR or explode spectacularly. And I want to do everything in my power to help ensure the former.”
(History of the Future, pg 343)

March 10, 2014
Iribe emails Gabe Newell:
“Sorry if we caused pain. We love Valve and want to maintain an awesome relationship with you guys. You’re an inspiration to me, Palmer, and the crew. There’s no one we’d rather change the world with…”
(History of the Future, pg 343)

March 11, 2014
Newell emails Iribe
“Yep, we look forward to continuing to work with you and Atman. I’m moving onto the VR team for a bit.”
(History of the Future, pg 343)

March 11, 2014
Oculus blog announcement: Welcome to Atman Binstock Oculus’ Chief Architect
“Atman was one of the lead engineers and driving forces behind Valve’s VR project, creating the ‘VR Room’ demo that garnered so much excitement at Steam Dev Days.”
https://www.oculus.com/blog/welcome-atman-binstock-chief-architect/?locale=en_US

March 16, 2014
Iribe & Carmack visit Zuckerberg’s home after Zuckerberg invited them via email “so they could talk in person about an acquisition… He ended with five words that Iribe loved hearing: I WON’T WASTE YOUR TIME.” After hearing Carmack’s vision, “Zuckerberg wanted to do a deal.”
(History of the Future, pg 344)

March 19, 2014
GDC 2014: Oculus Rift Developer Kit 2 (DK2) Pre-orders Start Today for $350, Ships in July
https://www.roadtovr.com/oculus-rift-developer-kit-2-dk2-pre-order-release-date-specs-gdc-2014/

~March 19-24
Abrash resigns from Valve, but doesn’t tell Iribe until the day of the Facebook acquisition on March 25, 2014. “Abrash texted Iribe with some rather big news of his own: days earlier, he had resigned from Valve.”
(History of the Future, pg 361)

March 24, 2014
“Finally, after four nearly sleepless days of negotiation, it appeared a deal would be reached.”
(History of the Future, pg 349)

March 25, 2014, 2:30 pm
Mark Zuckerberg Facebook post·”I’m excited to announce that we’ve agreed to acquire Oculus VR, the leader in virtual reality technology.”
https://www.facebook.com/zuck/posts/10101319050523971

March 25, 2014
Facebook to Acquire Oculus
https://about.fb.com/news/2014/03/facebook-to-acquire-oculus/

2:31 PM · Mar 25, 2014

BREAKING: Facebook announces it has reached agreement to acquire virtual reality tech company Oculus for a total of approx. $2B. $FB

— CNBC (@CNBC) March 25, 2014

March 25, 2014
Chris Dixon on Oculus: “I’ve seen a handful of technology demos in my life that made me feel like I was glimpsing into the future. The best ones were: the Apple II, the Macintosh, Netscape, Google, the iPhone, and – most recently – the Oculus Rift.”
https://cdixon.org/2014/03/25/oculus

March 25, 2014
Abrash calls Iribe and tells him he resigned from Valve, and then Iribe tried to convince him to join Oculus. Abrash asked to talk to Zuckerberg because “he wants to hear [Facebook's] true commitment to VR.”
Shortly afterwards, Abrash “agreed to become Oculus’s chief scientist.”
(History of the Future, pg 361)

March 28, 2014
Oculus blog: Introducing Michael Abrash, Oculus Chief Scientist

Fast-forward fourteen years. I’m at Valve – which started its existence by licensing the Quake source code – looking for the next big platform shift, and I conclude that it’s augmented reality. Thanks to Valve’s unique structure, I’m able to start working on that, along with several other interested people, including Atman Binstock, who I recruited over coffee at St. James Espresso in Kirkland; Atman is thinking about moving to Paris and writing a debugger, but finally decides to join up. John, meanwhile, is poking at virtual reality, seeing if it’s finally feasible. He sends me mail on the occasion of the 15th anniversary of Quake’s release, saying that he has a feeling that something really big is just around the corner, something bigger than anything that’s happened so far. He’s talking about VR.

Then two things happen at about the same time. On one path, Palmer develops his first VR prototype, John and Palmer Luckey connect, Oculus forms and its Kickstarter is wildly successful, DK1 ships, and John becomes Oculus CTO. Meanwhile, I read Ready Player One, strongly recommend it to several members of the AR group, and we come to the conclusion that VR is potentially more interesting than we thought, and far more tractable than AR. We switch over to working on VR just as Palmer’s homebrew project is morphing into Oculus.

From that point, both VR paths have been pretty well documented, Oculus’s in this blog, in the press, and all over the Internet, and Valve’s in my blog and talks. The end result, a year and a half later, is a VR system that can create a sense of presence – the feeling, below the conscious level, that you really are someplace. This is an experience that no one except a few researchers using awkward, hugely expensive equipment had ever had, but within the next couple of years it should be available in a comfortable form factor at a consumer price. In the space of two years, a relative handful of people at two companies, none of them VR experts at the start, somehow managed to resurrect VR from the trash heap of technologies-that-never-were and make it the most exciting technology around.

https://www.oculus.com/blog/introducing-michael-abrash-oculus-chief-scientist/

~March-April 2014
Blake Harris attributes Iribe saying, “We’re not just putting together the best VR team on the planet, but we’re cutting off Valve’s head and offering it to Zuckerberg.” *
* There’s a footnote from Harris says, “Iribe does not recall making this comment. ‘I always maintain a very respectable, good relationship with Valve.’” he says. “And I didn’t make comments like ‘cutting off their head.’”
(History of the Future, pg 362)

Post-March 2014
Valve News Network’s Tyler McVicker says it’s hard to get solid information about what was happening between March 2014 to March 2015 at Valve in my interview. See the hardware history pictures listed above that were shown at Valve’s demo area at GDC 2015.

May 2014
Valve goes on to collaborate with HTC to create the HTC Vive.

~October 20, 2014
Valve gathered devs in Seattle to a secret meeting to get early access to Vive dev kits, and for them to build the room-scale experiences that would premiere at GDC 2015.
https://www.engadget.com/2015-03-10-valve-htc-vr-owlchemy-indie-games.html

March 1 2015
HTC Vive is announced at Mobile World Congresss

March 4 2015
HTC Vive demos at Valve’s GDC area.

Please let me know if there’s other information that should be included in this timeline, or if you’d like to speak to me or do a Voices of VR interview about your stories from this period.

LISTEN TO THIS EPISODE OF THE VOICES OF VR PODCAST

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Music: Fatality

A virtual reality headset released in 2016

A virtual reality headset is a head-mounted device that provides virtual reality for the wearer. Virtual reality (VR) headsets are widely used with video games but they are also used in other applications, including simulators and trainers. They comprise a stereoscopichead-mounted display (providing separate images for each eye), stereo sound, and head motion tracking sensors^[1] (which may include gyroscopes, accelerometers, magnetometers, structured light systems etc.^[2]). Some VR headsets also have eye tracking sensors^[3] and gaming controllers.

History[edit]

The Sega VR, announced in 1991 and seen in early 1993 at the Winter CES, was never released for consoles,^[4] but was utilized for the Sega VR-1 motion simulator arcade attraction in 1994.^[5][6] Another early VR headset, the Forte VFX1, was announced at CES in 1994. The VFX-1 has stereoscopic displays, 3-axis head-tracking, and stereo headphones.^[7]Sony, another pioneer, released the Glasstron in 1997, which has an optional positional sensor, allowing the wearer to view the surroundings, with the perspective moving as his head moves, giving a deep sense of immersion. These VR headsets gave MechWarrior 2 players a new visual perspective of seeing the battlefield from inside the cockpit of their craft. However, these early headsets failed commercially due to their limited technology,^[8][9] and they were described by John Carmack as like "looking through toilet paper tubes".^[10]

In 2012, a crowdfunding campaign began for a VR headset known as Oculus Rift; the project was led by several prominent video game developers, including Carmack^[8] who later became the company's CTO.^[11] In March 2014, the project's parent company Oculus VR was acquired by Facebook for $2 billion.^[12] The final consumer-oriented release of Oculus Rift began shipping on 28 March 2016.^[13]

In March 2014, Sony demonstrated a prototype headset for PlayStation 4,^[14] which was later named PlayStation VR.^[15] In 2014, Valve demonstrated some headset prototypes,^[16] which led to a partnership with HTC to produce the Vive, which focuses on "room scale" VR environments that users can naturally navigate within and interact with.^[17] The Vive was released in April 2016^[18] and PlayStation VR in October 2016.^[19]

Virtual reality headsets and viewers have also been designed for smartphones. Unlike headsets with integrated displays, these units are essentially enclosures which a smartphone can be inserted into. VR content is viewed from the screen of the device itself through lenses acting as a stereoscope, rather than using dedicated internal displays. Google released a series of specifications and associated DIY kits for virtual reality viewers known as Google Cardboard; these viewers are capable of being constructed using low-cost materials (and a smartphone with a gyroscope), such as cardboard (hence the naming). Samsung Electronics partnered with Oculus VR to co-develop the Samsung Gear VR (which is only compatible with recent Samsung Galaxy devices), while LG Electronics developed a headset with dedicated displays for its LG G5 smartphone known as LG 360 VR.^{[20][21][22][23]} Asian hardware manufacturers like Xion and Kolke have developed inexpensive virtual reality headsets. In 2017, Chinese company Tencent announced it was preparing to launch its virtual reality headset that year.^[24] As of 2019, Oculus and PlayStation VR dominate the VR headset market.^[25]

In June 2019, Valve released their own headset, the Valve Index, without a partnership with HTC.

Constraints[edit]

Latency requirements[edit]

Virtual reality headsets have significantly higher requirements for latency—the time it takes from a change in input to have a visual effect—than ordinary video games.^[26] If the system is too sluggish to react to head movement, then it can cause the user to experience virtual reality sickness, a kind of motion sickness.^[27] According to a Valve engineer, the ideal latency would be 7-15 milliseconds.^[28] A major component of this latency is the refresh rate of the display,^[27] which has driven the adoption of displays with a refresh rate from >60 Hz (Mobile VR headsets and Oculus Go), 72 Hz (Oculus Quest), 80 Hz (Oculus Rift S), 90 Hz (Original Oculus Rift and HTC Vive), 120 Hz (PlayStation VR), to 144 Hz (Valve Index).^[29]

The graphics processing unit (GPU) also needs to be powerful enough to render the required amount of frames. Oculus cited the limited processing power of Xbox One and PlayStation 4 as the reason why they are targeting the PC gaming market with their first devices.^[30]

Foveated rendering is a new technique to reduce the rendering workload. It uses eye tracking hardware to determine at what point the user is looking and reduces rendering resolution farther from the user's gaze. This can be unnoticeable to the user because human peripheral vision is far less sensitive than the fovea.^[31]

Resolution and display quality[edit]

There are different optics and visual qualities that will affect how the individual perceives the image quality and how they experience the virtual world. The image clarity depends on the display resolution, optic quality, refresh rate, and the field of view.^[32]

Because virtual reality headsets stretch a single display across a wide field of view (up to 110° for some devices according to manufacturers), the magnification factor makes flaws in display technology much more apparent. One issue is the so-called screen-door effect, where the gaps between rows and columns of pixels become visible, kind of like looking through a screen door.^[33] This was especially noticeable in earlier prototypes and development kits,^[9] which had lower resolutions than the retail versions.

Lenses[edit]

An actual image displayed by a VR headset, showing compensation for lens distortion and chromatic aberration

The lenses of the headset are responsible for mapping the up-close display to a wide field of view,^[34][35] while also providing a more comfortable distant point of focus. One challenge with this is providing consistency of focus: because eyes are free to turn within the headset, it is important to avoid having to refocus to prevent eye strain.

Fresnel lenses are commonly used in virtual reality headsets due to their compactness and lightweight structure.^[36][37] The lenses do not use multiple pieces of material in their lenses like other lenses, but the lens will be broken down into sections, allowing the individual to have a wider range of view. The issue seen with the lens consists of seeing the ridges of the lenses when the headset is not properly aligned on the head.^[32][37]

The lenses introduce distortion and chromatic aberration, which are typically corrected in software.^[34][37] The lenses can also be adjusted dynamically to account for a user's eyeglass prescription so that the user can use the headset without corrective eyeglasses.^[38]

Controllers[edit]

Virtual reality was used by Nintendo's Wii game console by having the player use a controller to interact with the game of their choice, often being sports games. Soon after the release of Nintendo's Wii, Microsoft's Xbox received a full body reading system called Kinect and Sony's PlayStation got a similar virtual reality device named the PlayStation Move. These gaming devices use virtual reality to control avatars within a game, where the player's movements are copied by the avatar to complete the game. This means that the player is not truly engaged in the virtual reality world.^[39]

Uses in various fields[edit]

A U.S. soldier being prepared to use a ground combat training virtual reality headset at Fort Stewart in 2013

Medical training[edit]

Virtual reality headsets are being currently used as a means to train medical students for surgery. It allows them to perform essential procedures in a virtual, controlled environment. Students perform surgeries on virtual patients, which allows them to acquire the skills needed to perform surgeries on real patients.^{[citation needed]} It also allows the students to revisit the surgeries from the perspective of the lead surgeon.^{[citation needed]}

Traditionally, students had to participate in surgeries and often they would miss essential parts. Now, with the use of VR headsets, students can watch surgical procedures from the perspective of the lead surgeon without missing essential parts. Students can also pause, rewind, and fast forward surgeries. They also can perfect their techniques in a real-time simulation in a risk-free environment.^{[citation needed]}

Besides for training purposes, augmented reality headsets are also already being used for image-guided surgery.

Military training[edit]

Virtual reality headsets have been used by the United States Armed Forces. It is a particularly useful tool for training military personnel without putting them in harm's way.^[40]

The virtual reality headset allows the military personnel to interact with virtual reality people to make it feel real. They can talk to one another and do varying actions to make the virtual reality world feel like they are actually in that situation. There are also disadvantages and advantages when military personnel use the headset. The disadvantage is the headset is made for an indoor area, with a cool environment, and away from any heat, so when military personnel has just the headset on, no military equipment, it is not like their basic training. The advantages consist of repeating the situations multiple times and the cost of having the headset is less, due to no military equipment being needed.^[41]

See also[edit]

References[edit]

• Neural Holography Can Boost Real-Time VR, AR August 26, 2020 at 10:02 am

  The term holograph gets thrown around a lot and used in places where it doesn’t belong, but not here: A team at Stanford is bringing realistic, real-time holography one step closer for head-mounted, near-eye displays.

• Oculus Go Hands On: One Week With Facebook’s Standalone VR Headset May 9, 2018 at 7:30 am

  Last week, Facebook released the Oculus Go – a $200 virtual reality headset. It doesn’t connect to your PC like the Oculus Rift, and you don’t snap-in your phone like you would with the Gear VR. The screen, sensors, radios, and processing power are all inside the Go headset.

• Microsoft lays off Israeli HoloLens team, shifts focus to US development December 1, 2015 at 2:14 pm

  Microsoft has closed the Israeli division responsible for its initial HoloLens research and is moving all work on the technology to the US, for reasons that aren’t entirely clear. Either way, the company needs a better use-case around its new AR technology than it offered for Kinect.