Quotes from Palmer Luckey

A good story needs conflict, and virtual reality is a great hypothetical way to create conflict. ... In some ways, the future is going to be more boring than we think.

I'm a huge fan of online communities. I think that asynchronous internet-based communication forums such as Reddit and other discussion forums are one of the best things that could possibly have happened to collaborative invention. The Rift certainly would not exist without forums.

I'm really familiar with what Cardboard's doing; it's not a novel concept. Cardboard is in many ways a direct ripoff of FOV2GO, a project I helped work on when I was at ICT, and it was fairly well known in the academic VR community.

VR is going to become something mainstream, but it's not going to happen right away. You just don't have the horsepower to make it happen on a device, much less a cheap enough and comfortable enough device that a normal consumer is going to want to have.

If you're having a very high-adrenaline, high-movement experience in virtual reality, and then all of a sudden you're back in your office, that disconnect is pretty notable. Whereas if you're using it for virtual reality teleconferencing... there's really no kind of impact moving back and forth between the real and the virtual world.

The Arab Spring is kind of a perfect model for how people are going to use technology to act collectively in their own interest in the future. There's never been a revolution that was coordinated by social media to the degree that the Arab Spring was.

I started attending community college when I was 14 or 15, just doing general education stuff like history and mathematics. Then I went on to California State University Long Beach to pursue a degree in journalism. And then I ended up dropping out to found Oculus.

If I grew up in 'da hood,' it would make my story so much more interesting - if I had something to escape from. I had a pretty good life. My parents weren't rich; they weren't poor. I wasn't trying to escape from anything. It was always just the pursuit of something cooler.

Virtual reality is inevitably going to become mainstream - it's only a question of how good it needs to be before the mainstream is willing to use it.

There are times, especially when I was just getting into PC gaming, where I spent way less time playing than obsessing about the quality of the play.

As a PC gaming enthusiast, a significant chunk of my time and money was spent building and upgrading my rig, always in pursuit of a better gaming experience. At some point, I decided to take a look past my three 3D monitors and figure out what the absolute best theoretical gaming setup would be.

Games take years to make, and it's important that when we launch, it can't just be a great launch catalog and then a desert for a really long time. To be honest, for a lot of developers, they'd rather not be competing at launch with all this other software.

The games industry is the only industry with the tools and the talent to create real-time immersive 3D environments.

I wanted to play games in the best way possible, a way that was better than anyone else would have access to. As time went on, it became clear that VR was actually feasible on a large scale at a low cost, and at a quality far beyond what I had been hoping for.

Don't be afraid to convince yourself that your business is incredible, but don't expect others to be convinced without solid data to back it up. Ideas can be a worth a lot, but they are usually not. Execution is everything.

A lot of people, even if they know what VR is, see it as this tool to go in your basement and play Halo.

In the past, before phones and the Internet, all communication was face-to-face. Now, most of it is digital, via emails and messaging services. If people were to start using virtual reality, it would almost come full circle.

Ever since I was 15, I've tried to act and talk as if I was a public figure because I was sure that I would be one day and wanted to be prepared.

When you have more people investing in VR games, whether it's us or Sony or someone else, that means a greater pool of VR developers out there who know how to make VR games.

Focus comes a lot more easily when you desperately want the results of your own work - nobody else is going to do it for you.

It's going to be so obvious when something isn't well made for VR. People are going to use the best VR content. That's the stuff that's going to get shown to people. That's the stuff that's going to get demoed. That's most of what people are going to buy.

The Oculus Studio stuff is going to remain exclusive to the Oculus store and platform. That's not to say that you'll never be able to play it on other hardware, but it very much is exclusive to the Oculus platform.

I'm a huge gamer. I'm very excited, and the idea of the Rift was as a headset that was designed around the specific uses of VR gaming. But I'm excited about a lot of stuff that's outside of it, because I was a VR enthusiast. I want VR to be the thing that we all live in, that we all use for everything, not just games.

I think probably the majority of political actions don't go the way people are going to go. Just because there were unexpected consequences and maybe not the resolution people would have liked to have been seen doesn't mean it was less valid of an action.