Palmer Luckey is the original founder of Oculus VR and inventor of the Oculus Rift, a consumer virtual reality head-mounted display.

Luckey was frustrated with the inadequacy of the existing head-mounted displays in his collection for gaming due to low contrast, high latency, and low field-of-view. In response, he created his first prototype at age 18 in his parents’ garage in 2011, called CR1, and featuring a 90-degree field of view. Over the next 10 months he developed a series of prototypes exploring features like 3D stereoscopy, wireless, and extreme 270-degree field-of-view, while also decreasing size and weight. He posted regular updates on his work on MTBS3D, a forum website frequented by virtual reality enthusiasts. His 6th-generation unit was named the "Rift," and was intended to be sold as a do-it-yourself kit on the Kickstarter crowdfunding website to fellow enthusiasts rather than a pre-assembled consumer device, with a target of about 100 customers. He first started Oculus VR in order to facilitate the Kickstarter campaign.

The Kickstarter campaign was successful, raising $2.4 million or 974% of its original target. As a result, Oculus VR targeted a larger scale of units and expanded with more employees and an office space, but Luckey described his day-to-day process as not having "changed all that much," remaining a "slow plod towards making this thing a reality."

Oculus VR was acquired by Facebook in March 2014 for $2 billion. Luckey left the company in 2017.

In June 2017, Luckey co-founded the defense technology company Anduril, along with former Palantir Technologies executives Matt Grimm, Trae Stephens and Brian Schimpf, and early Oculus hardware lead Joe Chen. In March 2018, Anduril began a pilot program for the U.S. government to detect illegal immigrants attempting to enter Texas from Mexico.

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