WHEN in August 2012 Palmer Luckey, the inventor of the Oculus Rift, a virtual-reality gaming peripheral, asked for financing on Kickstarter, a crowdfunding website, he was hoping to raise just $250,000. Instead, nearly 10,000 people gave him a total of $2.4m to get his device ready for the mass market. Now Mr Luckey has even more cash to play with: his company recently announced it had raised a further $16m of funding from venture capitalists.
That money will allow Mr Luckey to hire more engineers to work on the Rift, which not only avid gamers have welcomed as a potentially transformative technology. From the outside the peripheral does not look like much: a set of thick black goggles attached to a headband. Yet slip the Rift over your head and effect is rather impressive: you become immersed in virtual reality.
