When the virtual reality headset designed by Palmer Luckey hit the Kickstarter platform seeking funding, Luckey became the virtual reality guru of Silicon Valley. Shortly after its presentation, many were the companies that were interested in the project, a project that finally ended up in the hands of Facebook, something that initially did not make any grace to all those backers who had opted for this project. But it seems that his adventure on Facebook has ended as we can read in the statement published by the social network. The reason? I think we will never know.
In the statement in which The abandonment of Facebook's VR guru has been announced We can read:
We will miss him. Palmer's legacy goes far beyond Oculus. His spirit of inquiry aided in the modern virtual reality revolution as well as helping to build an industry around it. We are grateful for all that you have done for virtual reality and Oculus. We wish him the best.
Perhaps one of the reasons for this decision has to do with the recently lost trial Oculus, trial for which he was sentenced to pay $ 500 million to Zenimax, for allegedly having used the technology that had been developed by this company, an intellectual property that John Carmack, a former Zenimax employee, took away before joining of the Palmer Lukey project.
In 2014, Facebook took over Oculus after paying $ 2.400 billion, to which he has had to add all the money he has invested since then in addition to the 500 million he has had to pay, which has triggered the costs of a project, which in the end has not been as successful as the company would have liked, since the HTC Vives, Oculus' direct competition, are selling twice as much.