The story of Palmer / Oculus / etc is full of massive RIFTS between partners and parties
I hadn't even heard about the TFT chapter but the more broadly reported one was the saga with Carmack / Palmer / Zenimax eg ->
- Zenimax bought ID software for >$100m(1) on June 24, 2009.
- Carmack signed up with Zenimax for an earn-out / golden-handcuffs agreement that ended in June of 2013.
- Carmack was enthralled with VR.
- Carmack found Palmer via an internet forum, reached out to get a rift to try.
- Carmack tinkered with the Rift, adding sensors, building calibration, etc. while on the clock / using hardware from zenimax.
- Carmack brought a prototype of the Rift working on Doom 3 to E3 with him providing Oculus with their early press.
- Zenimax realized the extent to which Carmack was enabling Oculus and worked to negotiate equity with Brendan Iribe.
- Oculus sent Zenimax a proposal to discuss a partnership Sept 21, 2012 but never followed up / followed through.
- Carmack quit Zenimax the day his contract was up in June 2013, joined Oculus as CTO a few months later and took his 5 best guys with him.
- FB bought Oculus March 2014, Zenmix got pissed and sued.
From my memory of the early rift I am positive that outside of Palmer it was Carmack's genius that made this viable and Carmack's video lent credibility to the campaign.
No major comment here just a wild history, not unusual for breakthrough & derivative technology!
And this possibly wasn't the beginning of tensions at ID/Zenimax about Carmack splitting his time with outside or non-core activities. Before VR there was Armadillo Aerospace and his pre-iPhone interest in mobile games. Carmack claimed that he tried to maintain some level of involvement with ID after quitting as a full-time(ish) employee, but that this was refused. Beyond even that, the spat may have been partly a continuation of ID office-political strife that stretched back to the Quake (1) era.
Then there's a whole other tangled story involving Michael Abrash and his comitatus at Valve, Palmer and the original Oculus guys, Mark Zuckerberg and Facebook, other teams at Valve that also got excited about VR or AR at different stages, and Valve's office politics and internal decision-making.
The thing that always had me shaking my head in that saga is that Carmack tried to get Zenimax work on VR but Zenimax had no interest before Facebook entered the picture.
Not only did they not have any interest, they didn't seem to balk when Carmack left ASAP when his contract was up and joined Oculus.
The fact they sued once they found out FB was involved, just makes it seem like they suddenly realized what Carmack was working on and could've delivered for them, and now that big money was involved, they panicked and had to slow the company down somehow.
I'd love to know what the actual timeframe is from the time Carmack left to the time Zenimax sued. It just seems so suspect the timetable and reeks of desperation of a company who discovered too late what they had all along and let go for nothing.
Then again, if Carmack being interested in something so strongly isn’t social proof enough, maybe you just aren’t very good at being an investor in this particular field.
He was right place right time almost always even if he didn't succeed. Armadillo Aerospace could have been SpaceX in a different timeline. Was clearly on the money with VR.
It's hard to feel bad for Zenimax here, they had opportunities and generational talents and wasted them.
> From my memory of the early rift I am positive that outside of Palmer it was Carmack's genius that made this viable and Carmack's video lent credibility to the campaign.
I'm positive of this. Palmer spotted an opportunity to use phone screens + MEMS sensors for cheap VR and garnered public support for his prototype by presenting it as an open source gadget.
Carmack thought it was cool, and brought his name, time, resources, business acumen and legendary development skills, got it running Doom 3. Next thing you know they have a million dollar Kickstarter and are pulling in massive rounds of funding.
Well yeah, isn't that what the GP was saying? Palmer had the initial idea and cobbled together a very basic proof-of-concept, Carmack then did the heavy lifting.
Add to this that most of CV1 architecture was lifted directly from the Valve Steam Sight headset - not sure how much of that went into rift. The valve employees who argued that valve should give the technology to Palmer without license (before any whispers of facebook acquisition) then jumped ship to facebook's oculus. Shady as fuck.
Oculus is a company that started shady and just gets shadier. They have a cheap good product but I won't support them. That doesn't even get into purchasing third party exclusives during their launch to keep them away from the competition, something that wasn't really a thing on PC at that point.
If this were true, there would be a lot more similarity between the CV1 and the Vive. From my medium-depth technical understanding, they seem about as dissimilar as it's possible to be while still both being PC-connected VR headsets and both being compatible with the same third party Unity/UnrealEngine games.
They’re both nearly identical in the ways that matter except for their outward appearance and minor things like audio, accessory ports, and the Vive’s camera.
They both have the exact same resolution OLED displays with a butterfly mechanism to adjust the IPD and fresnel lenses. They both use IMU’s as the primary tracking system with external components used for drift correction.
They both use optical tracking (except Vive is inside-out and Rift is outside-in.)
They both have incredibly similar software, with a very minor tweak needed to fully translate all the Rift calls to work completely on Vive.
The original Rift and Vive are very, very similar headsets. The most different thing about them is their controllers.
This sort of analogizing might fool a layman, but it will not fool someone who has looked at teardowns and done actual software development in the space. You need to be able to tell whether a similarity is more like two cars having the same engine controller firmware, or more like two cars both having carburetors, or more like two cars both having bought tires from the same third party supplier.
You picked the wrong two headsets to compare. The steam sight hmd is not the vive. You read a comment about the steam sight hmd and made a comment about the vive.
What secret knowledge of the steam sight headset do you have?
It's not really fair to call the Lighthouse system an "inside-out" tracking system. "Inside-out" generally refers to the tracking data collection and processing happening on data collected exclusively by the headset, without any specialized, external reference. That's not what Lighthouse does.
Lighthouse is nearly identical to outside-in camera tracking, with the one wrinkle being that the photons flow in the opposite direction. Instead of a fixed, designed constellation of point-like emitters on the headset, you have a constellation of point-like detectors. Instead of a stationary grid detector, you have a stationary grid emitter. But otherwise, the data is practically the same, the math is all the same, the calibrations are all the same, and the whole system doesn't work without those stationary, external reference points.
Similarly, ray tracing doesn't simulate photons leaving light sources, bouncing off surfaces, and arriving at a camera sensor. The simulation is of anti-photons, leaving the camera, bouncing off surfaces, and seeing what lights they hit. It's like conventional current actually being the opposite direction of electron flow. The systems can run forwards or backwards and get the same answer.
Actually inside-out tracking does a completely different thing. The acronym "SLAM" stands for "simultaneous locating and mapping". It's building up a coherent, consistent model of the world around it. It adapts to new surroundings.
Bump a Lighthouse emitter or CV1 camera out of position and everything stops working because the data no longer makes sense. Designing a Lighthouse headset or controller requires given the tracking code a 3D model of the position of all the detectors.
But move the furniture around in a room and SLAM catches up in a few seconds. SLAM also doesn't care about the shape of thing you're tracking. Hell, it really doesn't care all that much about the quality of the camera feed, other than being relatively high framerate and not very noisy.
It's simple enough to say that on the lighthouse system, the sensors are on the headset/controllers, and the beacons are cast from the lighthouse boxes.
On the oculus system the sensors were the external cameras, and the beacons were the LEDs on the devices.
My experience with both was that the oculus system did really well in a seated system but for room scale games the lighthouse system does better, especially when the controllers go behind you like in the valve archery game.
I haven't bought an oculus system since the DK2 so not sure how sophisticated it is now.
Windows MR (both VR headsets and the HoloLens), Magic Leap, Vive Focus, Pico Neo, and the upcoming Linx all use inside-out cameras, all with their own implementations. HTC Vive, Vive Pro, Vive Cosmos, Valve Index, Varjo XR-3 and VR-3, and PiMax headsets are the only ones using outside-in tracking anymore, and they're all using specifically Lighthouse.
First of all, you just don't really do that very often. People have rotator cuffs and elbows that make any action in those regions fairly uncomfortable.
Second, the all current VR systems primarily use inertial tracking. The visual tracking is only there to correct for drift out of the reference frame. Whether it's Lighthouse or Rift CV1 outside-in cameras or inside-out cameras on every other system, you can put your hands in the sensor blind spot for several seconds before it becomes a problem.
99% of the time, you're working with your hands in front of you. Lighthouse doesn't care about your hands in relation to your body. But it does care about your body in relation to the base stations. Lighthouse's blind spots are constantly changing over the course of your play session. Quest's are always in the same spot.
So many times I've found myself in a corner on the opposite axis of my base stations and my own body is blocking my controllers' view of the base stations. When that happens, you have to have enough awareness of what is going on to understand why your hands start slowly floating away while you are trying to work on something, having forgotten your orientation in the real world room. It's literally immersion breaking.
"Inside-out cameras can't track behind your head" is really not the problem that your random Valve fanboy on Reddit makes it out to be.
Controllers behind the head are tracked by some algorithm magic that fuses the last seen position by the cameras with accelerometer and gyro data for the blind spots. Seems to work like a charm. Probably not as good as full lighthouse system, but good enough.
Every extant tracking system uses IMUs as the primary tracking sytem. The Lighthouse base stations and the Oculus camera tracking are used to correct for sensor drift.
You need it to be this way, because the IMUs can run at fairly high frequencies (200 - 1000Hz), which is (in part) keeps latency low. The data paths and processing needed for the reference frame corrections are so complex that they can't be run anywhere near as fast. It's why the hand tracking on the Quest is so high-latency: there's no IMU on your hand.
And it's not "algorithm magic". It's mostly just Kalman Filtering.
according to Yates the optical tracking and fresnel lenses were the only things Oculus changed from the Steam Sight to the CV1. The rest of the actual architecture was the same.
The question will be what changed from the CV1 to the Rift, but I don't think valve is going to sue oculus either way. This is just to expand the understanding of how slimy a company oculus was even before it was acquired by facebook.
The vive is a device engineered by HTC. The Steam Sight headset was the device valve developed in their office. They are different headsets, and most people have never seen a steam sight headset.
The vive was developed in a hurry once valve realized Oculus' betrayal and the very real chance that the VR renaissance would be primarily owned by facebook and oculus' closed garden.
Unfortunately FB is gaining the market at the low end already. While not as high quality, you can even plug your Quest into a PC (assuming the PC is powerful enough to run VR) and run PC VR games. And with video cards so expensive, the only way VR is going mainstream any time soon is with lower end less expensive setups. Vive is about to release the Flow, which looks interesting, but from their product page I don't fully understand the niche it's looking to fill.
The flow is an ultra portable (think ultra light HMD that uses glasses arms to support itself on your head), phone controlled (Accelerometer and screen swiping) and phone driven (as in uses the phone video graphics) device which is a 3DOF headset primarily aimed at content consumption rather than games. Unfortunately at its price point, and lacking the controller and movement I'm use to with my headsets, it's a non starter for me.
It's an interesting idea at half its price, maybe.
Facebook gaining control of mass VR is basically why I feel pretty bearish about VR in general. If there's any company that can turn it into an anti consumer ad driven experience that experiments on you, its facebook.
Hopefully valve continues to put out competing hardware even if its niche for people willing to pay for a premium experience. The main issue right now is, as you say video card availability and prices.
The tensions go all the way back to the post-Doom (1) era. Carmack wasn't blameless either. Here's a fun war story from Sandy Petersen: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G_ga1TFBrBo .
Yeah this is a curious dichotomy. Universally hated from the outside but beloved from the inside. It does seem perhaps a little cult like though, the median tenure seems incredibly long - people join and _never_ leave.
Yeah, but Oracle is much better at it. If Zenimax really wants to compete with them, they need to be sending license auditors into my house to count the number of occupants as potential users and send me a bill for their use of &/or gaining of enjoyment through watching me play their games.
Well, you are kind of a dolt for doing side work on company time with company equipment and expecting anything other than the company expecting ownership/equity of the results.
I mean, you have a point, but at the same time, Carmack and Romero have literally been pulling these kinds of shenanigan's since John^2 were working at Softdisk. It doesn't make for the best business or legal decision, but it's certainly not a surprise to hear. It's kind of his MO.
I would find it hard to believe that Zenimax was unaware of what was going on.
Continuing to do the same thing again and again does not make it right, nor justify the behavior. Stop doing it. Your life becomes much easier. If you don't have self-discipline, then consequences happen. Yeah, it sucks, but dems da breakz.
Also, you are not always in control of who your corporate overlords will be. They can be decent, then sell, then new owners are not cool. Happens all the time.
Reading this strongly reminds me of the book The Fountainhead, where those who refuse to follow the same playbooks as the majority, are the ones who not only are responsible for helping to drive their respective industries forward, but are persecuted for it.
I think it’s fair to call John Carmack a visionary who has moved his industry forward multiple times. I think while some investors and business owners did not benefit (as much as they could have) from his work, the rest of the gaming world absolutely did.
"The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable man persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man."
I think this depiction of corporate highlights why innovation becomes difficult for larger companies at some point and why good engineers should cut ties from time to time.
Fully agreed. While his life would have definitely been much easier if he followed the "reasonable rules", easier != better. And to be fair, I am glad Carmack went for what he thought was the right move vs. him going for the move that he thought would lead him to an easier life.
He is one of the very few people in the industry (not just gaming, but technology in general) who manages to move the entire industries forward not once, but many times, and consistently so. All while remaining true to himself, caring about what he thinks matters the most, and not jumping head deep into corporate games just for the sake of it.
Maybe I am fanboying a bit here, but after reading Masters of Doom (a biographical piece on the early life of both Johns [Carmack and Romero], how they started ID Software together, and how it all turned out; heavily recommended for everyone here), it feels like I am experiencing an even more exciting sequel to it happening in real life in front of my eyes.
I'm sure he's really enjoyed all of those meetings with lawyers and various depositions and what not. There's probably nothing better he could have been doing with that time instead. You're totally right.
The real lesson is not to work with blood sucking lawyers. They'll look for any excuse to steal from anyone they can, and they'll use the legal system to do it.
Great writeup, I didn't know Carmack was involved to this extant.
My opinion on this, completely irrespective of the actual terms and laws:
Zenimax doesn't deserve anything.
But anyone who funded the original Kickstarter does (I was not one of those people). Anyone who put $200+ into that Kickstarter deserved some sort of payout. I feel like, at the very least, they should get free Oculus headsets for life.
It's hard to put a number on the total value created by that initial Kickstarter funding if it had been treated as an actual investment, but I'd be willing to bet that it's already in the billions, and will only grow.
We got the headset that we paid for, and we also got the next dev headset after that for free. I definitely feel like I got my money's worth from it.
I then switched for a Vive for my first retail headset, but I've since switched to Quest 2. Even though it shouldn't be better, the wireless functionality and ability to play games without a computer make it better than the original Vive. I'll likely be upgrading to whatever is next in the Oculus lineup.
I backed VR because I've always loved the idea of VR and AR, and desperately wanted it to take off. Palmer and Carmack did a great job of making that happen, and even though I don't like Palmer's politics, I'm very thankful that he got this ball rolling. If I had only gotten that first headset, I'd still feel like I totally got my money's worth. But the continued and increased presence of VR is the real payout for me.
My wife also has a Quest 2 now and we often play multiplayer games together, like Walkabout Minigolf. It's just amazing.
> I feel like, at the very least, they should get free Oculus headsets for life.
Is there something different about this kickstarter than most others? Did they offer ownership? Because it sounds like you think you bought something they don't think they sold.
Just because you compliment my son on his lemonade stand and tell him you believe in him and buy a lemonade doesn't entitle you to a share of his eventual billion dollar lemonade empire.
In all seriousness, it doesn't sound all that more far fetched than someone deciding they want to bring VR to the masses, starting a kickstarter, and then fast forward a few years and it's a large division of Facebook.
Just add a bunch of caffeine and call it an energy drink. Add some snazzy graphics (hell just put the kid's face on it) and you've got an empire. Or forego the caffeine and add some seltzer, or add some alcohol, or or or. Empires await!
> Anyone who put $200+ into that Kickstarter deserved some sort of payout
I agree but you'll have to blame the SEC for that. I'm sure Oculus and Kickstarter would have loved to sell equity to the public, and if they did then every backer would have made thousands of dollars on the deal. But the SEC's rules didn't allow equity crowdfunding at the time and they still impose limits that make it basically infeasible.
Every Kickstarter backer got exactly what they were promised (ranging from tshirts to dev kits, studio visits and more), and a bonus production headset on top, so I'm not sure where the question of deserving more comes from.
I also funded the Kickstarter and received a DK1 (and DK2). I believe I was fairly compensated, and that demanding some unspecified extra payout would be excessive. If you want stock, buy stock, and deal with the added risk that true investment entails.
With you on this. Someday maybe a collaborative DAO or similar model replaces Kickstarter if the SEC can sort their heads out and makes this a reality.
I mean, I got both the Dev Kit promised to me and they sent me a free production Oculus Rift when it launched, so I don't feel too cheated - But still disappointed by the Facebook sellout.
If people are wondering why this dry legal summary from two weeks ago is at the top of HN, it's probably because John Carmack just tweeted about how there's been a media blackout since their win: https://twitter.com/ID_AA_Carmack/status/1452758104735723526
According to Palmer Luckey there were tech reporters in the courtroom as the verdict was read, but they chose not to publish articles about it, presumably because something bad happening to Luckey/Oculus/Facebook would have been news, but something good doesn't fit the narrative. https://twitter.com/PalmerLuckey/status/1452753156895506433
Or maybe the reason is that it's not interesting. "Meritless lawsuit against huge company fails, status quo remains the same" stories play out every day. I'm sure it was a big deal for the participants, as most trials are, but, for anyone outside, its resolution is super boring.
I guess my question - given this lawsuit is so "boring" why do places like forbes go big into covering it early (facebook evil) but then when it is exposed as a sham, don't cover that outcome.
It would have been surprising and mildly impactful on the world at large, had Facebook lost. So the tech journalists were following it in the small chance that that happened.
It really seems like the folks who are upset at the lack of coverage are so emotionally invested in this trial for whatever reason that they can't see the truth that there's no reason to care about it outside of the personal feelings of the celebrities involved. At least with SCO v IBM, and Oracle v Google, the rulings could, and did, have significant impacts on how regular tech folks went about their careers.
If you always show bad things about fb, then you are controlling the narrative and making people believe fb is evil. If particular news outlet didn't cover before-trial, you would be ok for them to not cover trial outcome.
But if you cover before trial, it's in public's best interest you cover the outcome.
An analogy is some news outlet covering a murder trial and presenting the suspect as a ruthless criminal. By your logic, news should not cover if the criminal case turns out baseless... does that sound good to you?
Yes some civil claims about IP theft are definitely comparable to murder.
The reason that this gets covered before is that it sounds like juicy gossip. Turns out the gossip isn't "true" enough to get an interesting court result. So it's not really news. Those articles are just gossip.n the words of Dennis Nedry, nobody cares.
The intersection of people who think that FB is evil because of IP theft in the occulus thing but who don't also just come to this conclusion from all the other FB coverage of their non-action to stop genocides (random example), is the empty set.
"Someone makes intense claim regarding IP law theft": interesting! Maybe it's true? If it's true, that is interesting in itself! It's pure palace intrigue with basically no important consequences (even if Palmer Lucky were to lose all his money he would end up being fine in the way that everyone above a certain strata ends up only falling up).
"Turns out the claim is not accepted by the courts": given that this didn't really matter for anyone beyond the two people, not interesting!
The important aspect here being this is like a dispute around money with really no consequences. Of course doesn't help that the people involved are not exactly super friendly. Palace intrigue. Fun to read about and talk about! Not important
This isn't a one-off occurrence. This happens all the time. It's so frustrating seeing people, especially here on HN, get their pitchforks out over some accusations that reaffirm their views of an entity. Then when those accusations prove to be bullshit, crickets.
> Then when those accusations prove to be bullshit, crickets.
Yeah, a nobody (in the public's mind) making false accusations is not a story worth telling.
Facebook stealing billions worth of IP is.
That's obvious so far, isn't it?
Though you are right with news reporting giving unproven accusations and in-process trials far too much weight. This is not just happening with 'hated' entities like Facebook, but also publicly unknown individuals. It clearly can convey a distorted picture of the facts.
Then when those accusations prove to be bullshit, crickets.
In my experience, at the conclusion of a story, people never link to their previous comments that turn out to be incorrect or off-base, offering a mea culpa.
I wonder if you’re seeing is that sites have audiences that aren’t split 50/50 on potentially controversial subjects?
What jumps out at me is how little is available via RECAP on this case. The amended complaints, for example, aren't available--and that's literally the most important of the lawsuit! In the more interesting cases, far more of the docket is available, and often even some of the uninteresting minutiae of the docket (e.g., applications for pro hac vice) are sometimes available, presumably because someone unfamiliar with how the courts work wonders why this isn't available, buys it themself only to discover that it actually was uninteresting.
If reporters were in the courtroom to cover it, that means they thought that it would have been interesting, but only if Luckey had lost. This is fine if you see news as only entertainment. But if you expect news to be informative, then this kind of publication bias is presenting to you a warped version of the world and pretending that it's the truth.
See also how everyone believes crime is getting worse due to increasing news coverage, when the statistics say crime is decreasing.
There was coverage of the lawsuit filed against FB & Co. They got the bad press. Then once the lawsuit was ruled in their favor, there was no coverage. Whereas, if they lost, you bet there would be coverage.
Yes, misleading bullshit stories get more clicks, but selling misleading things is unethical, even if it does get more sales. You can't blame the public for buying something if they are being mislead about it.
But most of the time the media is not misleading. They are just reporting. They take the information they get and the repeat it. Most journalists wouldn't have the time nor energy to do anything but repeat the first layer of facts as they perceive it.
"But most of the time the media is not misleading"
This I disagree with, almost every story I have had in-depth knowledge of has been very misleading. This is partially laziness, but mostly due to wanting to present a coherent and engaging narrative.
No, I agree with you. As I said downthread, it's not a vast conspiracy, it's just incentives at work. But it's still a big problem that people should be aware of and care about and try to fix.
It is the news media's fault. They have complete control over what they decide to publish (or not), and how. The media chooses to post misleading information for clicks/money. "But someone will pay for it" is never an excuse to do something wrong.
While the media has control, the media is not omniscient or equipped with the capacity to handle all and every story. As somebody married to a journalist I can tell you that the whole primary news business of a country with 90m inhabitants such as Germany is processed by less than 5000 journalists. If you consider that the primary way that news media receive their news is via news agencies which have maybe 1000 employees in Germany then it becomes a strange argument that it would be the media's fault to cover some random litigation.
The media isn't choosing most things in the sense that online news media don't have a plotting war room where they decide what gets published and what doesn't, but rather they observe the news feeds of the agencies and their competitors and pick from this what gets printed in their own page.
Even if you are right that a news site leadership will equip different departments with staff and prescribe length etc, it is much less a guided process.
Not publishing on Oculus/Luckey/Zenimax isn't in any moral ballpark anyway.
I just searched a number of sites for "palmer lucky total recall". Many of the ones I checked (tech: The Verge, Gizmodo, cnet; mainstream: NY Times, Washington Post) never published any articles about this lawsuit.
IGN published one article when the lawsuit was first filed, and Destructoid published a copycat article. I'm not surprised the result was not interesting enough to write out, if they were even aware.
TechCrunch published an article when the case was dismissed in 2017 (before being resuscitated by the 9th Circuit), but nothing else before or after. Given that that was good news for Luckey, it shows an opposite 'bias' to the one being alleged.
Reuters did publish a number of articles about the case's progress and hasn't published anything about its ending, so I guess you can blame them?
But overall, this is just not a case that's gotten a lot of media attention.
Seems like it was covered in the enthusiast press. IGN and Destructoid as you noted. I also found coverage on Engadget, Gamespot, Polygon.com, VRFocus, UploadVR, Gamersnexus, Gameinformer, VentureBeat, Forbes. As well as mentions of the suit in other articles, used as a way to frame Luckey as someone who is constantly getting sued.
It seems very difficult to find old news articles actually. Google News doesn't turn up most of the stuff I found, I had to explicitly search the individual sources. Who knows what else is missing.
While I do think many media sources have an obvious self-interested bias against Facebook, I think Luckey is biased himself in how he portrays this affair in his tweets. He talks about how the press covered the filing of the lawsuit, but neglects to mention that it was originally filed in 2015, and has been through numerous twists and turns since, being dismissed, reinstated upon appeal, etc. before finally reaching a jury trial.[1]
Coverage in general has declined as the years have gone by, and this latest trial garnered little attention when it started. It wasn't as if there was minute-by-minute reporting that went dark as soon as the verdict came in. Yes, a loss for Oculus would have been an interesting story, and would have been reported on, but the reality is that Oculus and VR are simply not the zeigeisty topics they were in 2015, or even 2017, and so a "Goliath beats David after six year legal slog" story was never likely to be make headlines.
As someone who spent years fighting against a meritless suit, Luckey is entitled to feel aggrieved, and to wish that its end would be as big news as its beginning. But objectively its easy to see why it wasn't, without necessarily ascribing it to an industry-wide conspiracy of silence.
> It wasn't as if there was minute-by-minute reporting that went dark as soon as the verdict came in.
Luckey alleges that reporters were there and ready to cover it in case he lost. So there was still interest, just not interest in anything that was good for him.
> a "Goliath beats David after six year legal slog" story was never likely to be make headlines.
This is pretty much a statement of the problem right here. If your goal in reading the news is to be entertained, then it's not a problem. But if your goal is to become informed, then this bias against a certain kind of story is presenting a warped version of reality to you while pretending that it is the truth.
It's not a vast conspiracy. It's just incentives at work, but the outcome is lamentable.
Bari Weiss is unfortunately not the bearer of speech freedom given her resorting to ad hominems and attack words she didn't even know the meaning to and her protests against speech and professors and academic freedom when she was at Columbia.
I hadn't even heard about the TFT chapter but the more broadly reported one was the saga with Carmack / Palmer / Zenimax eg ->
- Zenimax bought ID software for >$100m(1) on June 24, 2009.
- Carmack signed up with Zenimax for an earn-out / golden-handcuffs agreement that ended in June of 2013.
- Carmack was enthralled with VR.
- Carmack found Palmer via an internet forum, reached out to get a rift to try.
- Carmack tinkered with the Rift, adding sensors, building calibration, etc. while on the clock / using hardware from zenimax.
- Carmack brought a prototype of the Rift working on Doom 3 to E3 with him providing Oculus with their early press.
- Zenimax realized the extent to which Carmack was enabling Oculus and worked to negotiate equity with Brendan Iribe.
- Oculus sent Zenimax a proposal to discuss a partnership Sept 21, 2012 but never followed up / followed through.
- Carmack quit Zenimax the day his contract was up in June 2013, joined Oculus as CTO a few months later and took his 5 best guys with him.
- FB bought Oculus March 2014, Zenmix got pissed and sued.
From my memory of the early rift I am positive that outside of Palmer it was Carmack's genius that made this viable and Carmack's video lent credibility to the campaign.
No major comment here just a wild history, not unusual for breakthrough & derivative technology!
(1) https://www.scribd.com/document/274211118/Judge-denies-Faceb...
(2) http://www.gamespot.com/articles/zenimax-raised-105-million-...