Palmer Luckey is working on a new headset

Palmer Luckey says it will announce it’s working on a new headset at AWE 2024, which takes place June 18-20.

It comes after Luckey’s new company ModRetro just announced and opened pre-orders for the Chromatic, a $200 handheld that can play Game Boy and Game Boy Color cartridges on a screen with the same resolution and colors as the original consoles for a pixel perfect and color accurate. experience.

VR enthusiast and YouTuber Brad Lynch responded to Chromatic’s announcement at X by saying “Even Palmer would rather release a handheld than a VR HMD,” referring to the release of Valve’s Steam Deck rather than an Index successor or headset. new independents (the Index is now five years old). But Luckey responded to Lynch to say, “I’m going to announce the fact that I’m working on a new HMD at AWE!”.

If you’re somehow unaware, Luckey founded Oculus VR in 2012 to launch the Kickstarter campaign that would eventually lead to the consumer Oculus Rift in 2016, essentially resurrecting VR from the dead. Luckey was the public face of Oculus until 2017 when he was fired by Facebook, to which the company sold Oculus for over $2 billion in 2014. Luckey went on to co-found defense company Anduril Industries, recently valued at $12.5 billion.

In his blog post announcing the Chromatic handheld, Luckey claims he would have opened the consumer Oculus Rift if he hadn’t been fired before he could. Oculus previously open-sourced two Rift development kits.

In 2018, Luckey modified an Oculus Go headset to make it completely black, which is important on the worn side to reduce internal reflections that can be seen as “god rays” in the lens. He also removed the battery from the front to mount it externally on top of the headband and replaced the cooling system with a lighter aluminum fin alternative and a small micro-blower.

In 2022, Luckey modified a Meta Quest Pro to build a single headset, which he said actually kills the user if they die in a VR game inspired by the Sword Art Online anime series. Luckey described the device as a “piece of office art” and “a thought-provoking reminder of uncharted avenues in game design”.

Palmer Luckey gave his take on Quest Pro and Vision Pro

Palmer Luckey gave his take on the Meta Quest Pro and Apple Vision Pro and explained what he would do differently if he were still at Oculus:

In a podcast appearance last year, Luckey praised Apple’s strategy with the Vision Pro as “going after the right market segment that Apple should be going after,” and said he thought the Meta abandoned the high end of the market too soon, not given the technology has enough time to progress through the usual adoption cycle.

“There’s been a constant push at Facebook to make VR something that everyone is interested in using, but I think it’s kind of premature. I wrote a blog post years ago called Free is not cheap enough and in it I make an argument against the idea that the thing holding VR back is cost.”

“There was one thing I said right before I left. I pointed out in the marketing and targeting discussions, that there was too much Starbucks and not enough Mountain Dew.

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He also described Quest Pro as a good step in a poorly executed direction, pointing out that Meta completely failed to take advantage of the first standalone client port with built-in eye tracking.

We’ve reached out to Luckey for any specific details or teasers about the headphones he plans to announce at AWE. Given the unconventional nature of Luckey’s existing hardware endeavors, from the Oculus Rift to retro handheld consoles and autonomous weapon systems, there’s plenty of room for speculation as to what direction this headset might take. We will update this article if we hear back from Luckey.