Palmer Luckey

Palmer Luckey
Luckey at the 2016 Game Developers Conference
Born	Palmer Freeman Luckey (1992-09-19) September 19, 1992 (age 24) Long Beach, California
Nationality	American
Education	California State University, Long Beach
Occupation	Founder of Oculus VR
Known for	Founder of Oculus VR and prototyped Oculus Rift
Net worth	US$700 million (2015)

Palmer Freeman Luckey is an American entrepreneur. He is the founder of Oculus VR and designer of an early version of the Oculus Rift, a HD VR head-mounted display that provides the user with different virtual realities. Luckey ranks #26 on Forbes' 2015 list of America's richest entrepreneurs under 40.

Luckey was born and raised in Long Beach, California, and grew up with three younger sisters, a mother, and a father who worked at a car dealership. As a child he was homeschooled by his mother, took sailing lessons, and had an interest in electronics. He took community college courses at Golden West College and Long Beach City College beginning at the age of 14 or 15, and started at California State University, Long Beach in 2010 as a journalism major. He also wrote and served as the online editor for one of the university's student-run newspapers, Daily 49er.

From ages 11 to 16, he experimented with a variety of high-voltage electronics projects including coil guns, Tesla coils, and lasers. He built a PC costing tens of thousands of U.S. dollars with an elaborate six-monitor setup. He had an intense interest in virtual reality (VR), and built an extensive private collection of over 50 different head-mounted displays.

To fund these projects, he earned at least US$36,000 by fixing and reselling damaged iPhones, and was also a sailing coach and did boat repair.

In 2009, he founded ModRetro Forums, a website for discussing modifications to old hardware devices such as game consoles and PCs.

During his time at Cal State Long Beach, he worked as a part-time engineer at the Mixed Reality Lab (MxR) at the Institute for Creative Technologies (ICT) at the University of Southern California as part of a design team for cost-effective virtual reality.