By David Nelson, Director, MxR, ICT
As Palmer Luckey, Founder, Anduril Industries (and designer of the Oculus Rift), prepares to open the President’s Speaker Series at Pepperdine, David Nelson, Director, MxR, ICT, looks back to Luckey’s early days in our lab – and then reveals where our research is going next.
I was fascinated to see Palmer Luckey as an invited guest in the President’s Speaker Series at Pepperdine University, discussing the ethical participation of technology in the defense sector, and AI applications. He’s come a long way since 2010 when I was his supervisor and we were hot gluing foam-core virtual reality viewers together in the Mixed Reality Lab’s prototyping room at USC’s Institute for Creative Technologies.
Back then, we were working on bringing these novel viewers (the brainchild of then lab director, Mark Bolas, and admittedly the inspiration for Google’s Cardboard viewers released nearly two years later). We brought dozens of these viewers in thin manila envelopes, to the IEEE VR conference where we won the IEEE VR Best Demo Award for providing attendees a free and compelling VR experience using only the phones in their pockets and our FOV2GO viewers. Our work was widely featured in the Media, including on CBS.
Lab Tech Palmer Luckey Joins ICT
I remember when Palmer first came to visit the lab, Mark (Bolas) was impressed by this young VR enthusiast’s knowledge of the history of VR hardware. Showing him around the lab, Mark opened up a plastic tub and was surprised when Palmer accurately identified some ancient VR artifacts that were made when he was likely only a toddler. Yes, we hired him on the spot.
In the lab’s ongoing quest for low-cost VR we began putting together what we called ‘Franken-viewers’, pairing wide-field-of-view lenses with LCD displays. These make-shift HMD’s were used on some early seminal VR projects like Skip Rizzo’s Med VR research, and student-developed experiences from Nonny DelaPeña (“Hunger”); Juli Griffo (“Shayd”) and the early immersive games of Nate Burba and James Illif, who went on to found the game company Survios. The designs for these early experiments were open-sourced and released at Maker Faire in 2012.
Oculus Rift Released
In June 2012, Palmer Luckey left his lab assistant job at MxR to launch a Kickstarter campaign – for Oculus Rift. He was hoping for funding to build out his own low-cost high-end VR display, and turn his passion for bringing VR to the masses into reality.
Less than two years later his company was acquired by Facebook for $2 billion. We now felt we accomplished the mission set forth by Dr. Jim Blake, the US Army’s Program Executive Officer for Simulation, Training, and Instrumentation for the MxR Lab to “disrupt the supply chain of VR hardware.”
The truth is this could not have happened without Palmer. I believe that what it really took to get the research and development out of the laboratory and into people’s hands was his passion, energy and bravado, his near evangelical conviction, the capital that followed, and perhaps less glamorously, the decades of research, development and knowledge that preceded it.
MxR Today
The new wave of VR is now underway and we owe Palmer’s dedicated vision some gratitude for getting us there. But things are changing. When the Mixed Reality Lab (MxR) was established at ICT in 2008, it was with the goal of exploring emerging human-machine interactions and coming up with innovative hardware, platform, and system solutions along the way. The resulting research in virtual reality (VR) and augmented reality (AR) pushed immersive technology out of the lab and introduced it to the public. As I described above, our work has directly impacted the development of high-end VR headsets like the Oculus Rift and inspired the creation of low-cost VR headsets like Google Cardboard.
MxR has since broadened its focus to include Extended Reality User Interfaces & Experiences (XR UI/UX), Spatial Data Visualization, Adaptive HMI, Generative AI Content Creation, and Immersive Story-Based Learning. From training and operations, to education and entertainment, MxR continues to create substantial impact through its rapid prototyping ethos and thoughtful approach to human centered design.
Some of these projects we can talk about – including DIVIS (Digital Interactive Victim Intake Simulator), built in close cooperation with the United States Army Sexual Harassment/Assault Response and Prevention (SHARP) Academy at Fort Leavenworth, ICT; and ELITE (Emergent Leader Immersive Training Environment) a platform of tools, part of which is now a prerequisite for attending Army Warrant Officer School.
Other projects are in prototype-phase, such as ITEMS (Intelligent Training for Equipment Maintenance System), which brings AI-supported diagnosis and verification at the Army National Training Center to maintain their fleet of armored personnel carriers and tanks. We will also be demoing the Watercraft and Ship Simulator of the Future, supporting the Military and Sealift Command fleet as they patrol international waters, to safeguard freedom of navigation at the I/ITSEC conference in Orlando in December.
Then there are a whole new group of innovations we can’t yet talk about – but watch this space.
In the meantime, back at ICT’s MxR in Playa Vista, we wish our former lab tech, Palmer Luckey all the best. He’s moved on from VR hardware too, focusing on technology to address national security threats, as Founder of Anduril Industries. If you plan to be in the Malibu area at noon on Tues Oct 1st, here’s the sign-up list for Luckey’s speech.
//