> I followed the development of the rift pre-Oculus, and none of what Zenimax are saying seems to be grounded in reality.
I was following Palmer's progress on the MTBS3D forums long before he even thought about the Rift. He'd been modding HMDs and recombining old 90's hardware in very interesting ways - as someone who was very into homebrew VR back in the mid-1990s, by 2012 it had become something of a "once-upon-a-time" fad (VR winter, maybe?) - nobody sold any kind of real HMD, nobody was really doing anything - it fascinated me.
At the time, I was collecting up what little detritus of the 90s VR craze existed (I managed to get a complete collection of PCVR magazine before it was impossible to do so, plus numerous HMDs, Powergloves, Ascension FOBs trackers, etc). When I saw what Palmer was doing, he was like one of a handful of people I knew of who was playing with this stuff. It was really in left-field at the time! I had stopped really playing with it myself, pursuing other things - but when I saw what he was doing, I knew at that time that if VR was to ever make a comeback, Palmer would be at the front.
Which is what led me to back his KS when he announced it.
> As I remember, Carmack's real innovation was to create a full screen effect that compensated for the cheap optics that palmer's design used
He may have coded up one of the first shaders for this, but the idea of doing a software-based barrel warp transform has been around since the early-1990s or further, when LEEP was selling their optics system:
http://www.leepvr.com/
It was insanely expensive. I have no doubt that Palmer knew of them, since he was playing with old-school VR parts. His drive indicated to me that he probably has read all of the old-school books/magazines on VR and such, which all talked about the LEEP system.
The patent on the optics ran out sometime in the early-2000s, IIRC (?) - and I think Palmer jumped on it, especially when low-cost, high-res phone displays became available for experimenters.