Founder & CEO, Anduril
[6/9/14 E3 2014] Oculus Founder Palmer Luckey interviews Spike TV about the Oculus Rift
This was shot on Day 1 of E3 2014 and the game featured in this video is "Super Hot".
BTW, sorry for the Potato Quality; I recorded it off the official stream.
About Palmer Luckey
Palmer Luckey, founder and CEO of defense technology company Anduril, has been promoting a vision of American military power centered on mass-producible, autonomous weapons systems. In multiple public appearances, he argued that the United States should design weapons that can be manufactured by existing industrial facilities, such as car factories, rather than converting factories for military production. He described Anduril's Venom engine as having 90% fewer parts than competitors' engines and being assemblable with 10 simple hand tools. Luckey also discussed Anduril's autonomous fighter jet, calling it the first such U.S. system to be deployed with weapons. He stated that the company uses its own money to decide what products to build and then sells them to the government, describing Anduril as a "defense product company." Luckey has advocated for the United States to transition from being "the world police to being the world gun store," meaning equipping allied countries to defend themselves rather than fighting on their behalf. He expressed skepticism about the U.S. public's willingness to engage in another large-scale ground war, saying "we probably do not have in our national spirit right now the will to go and fight for someone else." On artificial intelligence, he said he is more worried about "dumb AI in the hands of evil people" than about hyper-intelligent hostile AI. Luckey also criticized the patent system, calling patents "Chinese instruction manuals," and argued for expanding the national security patent process. He described Anduril as a "nonpartisan but political company" that takes no side in American partisan issues but supports a stronger U.S. military relative to adversaries.
Transcript (17 segments)
✨ AI-enhanced transcript with speaker attribution
J
Jeff Keighley0:11
All right, All Access is back here live at E3 2014. I'm Jeff Keighley and I am here with the founder of Oculus VR Inc. and the new BFF of Mark Zuckerberg, Palmer Luckey. Palmer, it's great to be here. It's so awesome to have you here, man. This is so cool. Oculus Rift, everyone I'm sure has probably heard about it. You guys have been in the news with this amazing device, but gaming really is the core of Oculus, right? I mean, it was built for gaming first and foremost.
P
Palmer Luckey0:34
Well, yeah, it was originally built for gaming and it's going to be used for other things like education, medicine, training, communication, all that. But right now, the only industry that's really equipped to make high-performance, immersive 3D worlds is the game industry. So for right now and for the foreseeable future, it is going to be games that really drive this. And even as we get into all those other things, games are going to be one of the biggest markets in virtual reality.
J
Jeff Keighley0:58
Yeah, and you know, people at home may see this and see, well, what does it feel like? And we're going to take you inside one of these games. We've got Superhot that Joe is playing here, which is a cool game. But the idea of, you know, immersing yourself in these worlds, you can see here obviously. Can you explain to some people, you're seeing both eyes, right? What someone is seeing there?
P
Palmer Luckey1:13
Yeah, so what Joe is seeing is he's got the game is rendering two images, one for each eye, a lot like a 3D TV. They're very wide field of view images and we've got it mirrored up on this screen just for people who are watching. The latency from the screen to here is not representative because there's so much hardware between. The idea is, I mean, you know what's cool about it, literally your head. Exactly. So we have really precise six degrees of freedom head tracking running at a thousand hertz that allows you to track your orientation of your head and also the position. So like you can see Joe is able to look at these bullets as they're going by. And like Joe, try leaning backwards. Yeah, like, oh, well, he leaned in one but got killed. But so he can look up, he can look down, he can look all around, he can peer around corners. It really gives you a lot more freedom to interesting gameplay than you have when you're just looking through a small frame, you know, on your wall.
J
Jeff Keighley2:04
So let me ask you about, you know, the gaming application of this. I think a lot of people when they try this say this is really cool, but do you see a point where, I mean, someone's going to sit with one of these for, you know, 30, 40 hours playing a game? I mean, you know, people love to binge on games. I mean, do you see people playing not that many, 30 or 40 hours, you never know, some of these RPGs though, or even, I mean, people, you know, fully immerse themselves in the world.
P
Palmer Luckey2:25
I'm sure there will be someone who does it. I don't know if that'll be a typical, not all one sitting, long gameplay, right? Yes, exactly. And right now the hardware that we have, I mean, even right now this is development kit hardware. It's not meant to be as small as possible, it's meant to move as quickly as possible and allow us to get something out right away. The consumer product is a lot smaller, a lot lighter, a lot sleeker, and eventually it's going to become, you know, like a pair of sunglasses. I'm not promising that in any kind of near-term capacity, it's just, you know, off in the future.
J
Jeff Keighley2:54
Right. And it's funny because people are like, oh, but you know, what are you going to do? Are you going to have to have, if you wanted four people over, you just got to have four headsets sitting around? And to me that's like asking, hey, so you have people on your telephone, what, they're all going to go to the telephone room and they're all just going to have their telephones? Like, no, people are eventually going to have these as personal devices, like I have my phone and you have your phone, right? And they're going to get that. Tell me about, you know, this is as you said, it's development hardware. I mean, you kickstarted it, people, a lot of developers can get access to this. What will the consumer product feel like compared to this? Because this is not what you're ever going to buy as a consumer, right?
P
Palmer Luckey3:26
No. So we shipped the original development kits that we raised money from Kickstarter. We've been taking orders for DK2, the second development kit, since GDC in March, and those are shipping next month. The features of DK2 are actually pretty close to what is going to be in the consumer product in terms of the kind of tracking, the wide field of view. But the consumer product is going to be thinner, lighter, better ergonomics, but also higher resolution and higher frame rate, wider field of view, pretty much improved in every specification.
J
Jeff Keighley3:54
Higher frame rate even?
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Palmer Luckey3:55
Oh yes. So the DK2 is running at a maximum of 75 hertz. It's a 75 hertz low persistence OLED display. The consumer version, you really have to be, you see huge returns up until above 90 hertz. Oh my god. Like when people complain, oh, the game isn't 60 frames a second, 60 frames per second is not where the improvements stop. It really, actually, the bar is much higher, especially in virtual reality.
J
Jeff Keighley4:17
Is it going to be called the Oculus when it comes out?
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Palmer Luckey4:20
It is going to be called the Oculus Rift, or just the Rift. The Rift is the product and Oculus is the company, just like you don't say check out my Apple iPhone, or you wouldn't say check out the Apple. Yes, okay, so the Rift, yes. It's confusing even to me sometimes.
J
Jeff Keighley4:34
Well, that's good. And Rift, do we know when it's coming out roughly, or?
P
Palmer Luckey4:37
We have nothing to announce at this time.
J
Jeff Keighley4:39
All right. Well, hopefully, well, it seems like there are lots of great games people can check out and a lot of great technology. Have an amazing group of people, John Carmichael, Michael Abrash, a lot of really smart people working with you.
P
Palmer Luckey4:48
We hired like 40 people since April, so it's been a really big ride. And we have a bunch more hires to announce even in the very near future. Oh, and the Superhot guys, they're on Kickstarter right now, so people should give them money.
J
Jeff Keighley4:58
All right, well, it's very cool, Palmer. It is so awesome to have you by here. Congratulations on all the success so far. Hopefully we'll have you back here next year, maybe with a consumer product, and people at home will be playing it. All right, thanks so much, Palmer. Superhot, Superhot. Palmer rocking it on Spike TV. Control yourself, Palmer Luckey. All right, later on in the show we'll have some debut footage of a brand new game for the Oculus Rift, so there's more Oculus coming, more new stuff. All right, stick around, it's all coming up here on Spike. But let's go over to Amanda right now, they are having a lot of fun in there. Last year we got the console goals and a promise of a next-gen future, and now that we're on that road trip, we're asking, are we there yet? Jeff joins us once again to sift through the day's announcements for titles that might truly change the way we play games. Here are more examples.