WIRED ICON
Peter Thiel, Cofounder of PayPal and Palantir, prominent libertarian
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Palmer Luckey, Founder of Oculus and Anduril
Peter Thiel sometimes seems bored by mainstream tech[1]. “You have as much computing power in your iPhone as was available at the time of the Apollo missions,” he said during a debate in 2013. “But what is it being used for? It’s being used to throw angry birds at pigs.”
It was perhaps this sense of unfulfilled potential that drew him to Palmer Luckey, the never boring inventor who made the first prototypes of the Oculus Rift[2] as a home-schooled 17-year-old. Luckey has since created Anduril, a military tech company also funded by one of Thiel’s VC firms. He talked with WIRED about his visions of the future.
I was looking at one of the photos from WIRED’s recent story about Anduril[3], and I noticed a red rotary phone on your desk. What’s that? I ask because my grandfather, who served in the Defense Department, also had one of those phones.
Ah, the red phone! I’ve been experimenting a lot with vestibular implants for virtual reality[4]—being able to stimulate the inner ear in a way that allows you to feel a sense of motion. You can use the same hardware to pipe sounds right into your skull. As we were playing around with this stuff, we threw together a quick project. We called it the Palmer Phone. The idea was we’d set up the red phone in our office and link it to my vestibular implants. You wouldn’t need to call me; I wouldn’t need to answer; there wouldn’t be any ring. You’d just pick up that phone and start talking, straight