Why Has No Headset Matched the Oculus Rift?
Palmer Luckey says no headset has matched the Oculus Rift CV1, the first modern consumer virtual reality headset, because it got the ergonomics more or less perfect in 2016, and literally nobody has done as well since, even Apple. The team was already showing it off in 2015. He cannot comprehend how the ergonomic design led by a 19 year old kid with no experience is still better than anything anyone has come up with since, and it has been over a decade.
He has long believed the compute and the battery should come off the front of the head. Oculus Quest was the last thing he worked on before he was fired. Prototypes codenamed Santa Cruz put the battery and compute on the back of the head and kept the soft tissue on the front as light as possible, and the team was showing Santa Cruz in public before he was fired. After he was fired, the hardware was jammed into one giant lump on the front, the ergonomics were ruined, and the reason for a top strap was forgotten.
The new Meta virtual reality glasses are the closest thing. They are very lightweight, the compute is off the headset, the batteries are off the headset, and the pass through is really high quality. They also use a feature he invented for CV1 called Transformo fabric, though they do not call it that.
