If there’s one person responsible for the modern resurgence of interest in virtual reality, it's Oculus founder Palmer Luckey. And even he appears to be blown away by the upcoming Apple Reality Pro VR headset.
Luckey was the wunderkind mastermind behind the original Oculus Rift VR hardware, bringing it to market via crowdfunding efforts in 2012. Its success (and potential) would see it fall under the radar of Mark Zuckerberg’s then-Facebook company, which purchased Oculus in 2014. Though Luckey would leave the company to focus on defense tech company Andruil Industries, Facebook would go on to change its name to Meta and reposition its focus to gravitate around virtual reality and the ‘metaverse’ from which it pulled its new name.
So Luckey, though now removed somewhat from the public eye of consumer tech, remains an influential (if controversial) figure in the virtual reality industry. And he’s given Apple’s new VR hardware his seal of approval. In a one-sentence tweet, Luckey states ‘The Apple headset is so good.’
The Apple headset is so good.May 14, 2023
Apple VR in the wild?
Luckey doesn’t elaborate in the tweet chain that follows on whether or not he’s seen the device, tried it, or is simply commenting on the same rumors that the rest of the VR-interested industry has seen.
But it marks a change in his attitude towards Apple, having given its hardware a frosty reception during his Oculus tenure. Luckey famously stated he wouldn’t bring Mac support to Oculus’s Rift line until Apple had a ‘good computer’ with high-end GPU support. But that was many years ago, and Apple now packs its best Macs with its own M-series silicon that’s efficient and powerful enough to run high-end VR experiences on a wearable device itself.
What’s worth noting though is that Luckey first made VR waves a decade ago — he even made it onto the cover of Time Magazine, which claimed VR would change the world. In the intervening years, the hardware has got much better, Facebook / Meta and other companies have thrown billions of dollars at the concept, and… it still remains a niche market. Apple doesn’t deal in ‘niche’ markets, and so there remains an air of skepticism around whether or not even Apple will be able to make virtual reality a success among the masses. It may be winning over diehard true believers like Luckey, but the general public remains a difficult VR user base to crack.
