I'm not sure how I feel about this - ambivalent, I guess - pretty much how I felt after the FB acquisition.<p>I was a KS supporter - but I had followed Luckey for a while before on the MTBS3D forums, when he was just playing around, modding classic HMDs - mixing up the parts. He was one of only a handful of people that I could see who still played around with VR in that mid-to-late 1990s way. At the time, I thought that if there were anybody who could bring back VR, it was him.<p>I've played with DIY "homebrew" VR off and on since the mid-90s. I have a collection of old HMDs and other gear from the era. I've modded a powerglove, and at one time hooked it up to my Amiga and messed around with AMOS3D for fun with it. Later, Rend386...in short, I was disappointed to see VR die - so when the Kickstarter was announced, I was - to put it mildly - stoked.<p>That KS was the first one I backed (and not the last!) - I had high hopes, especially because Luckey had made a huge deal out of there being Linux support. With the FB deal, that was dropped, and that's when for me at least, the gilding rubbed off revealing a more base interior to the whole thing. Still, I had hoped that it would all lead somewhere.<p>In a way, I guess it did. More people than ever before got to play around with VR and such, and experience it all in ways that in the mid-90s I could only dream about (the tech just didn't exist at a price any normal person could afford). It was, though, a disappointment to hear that people were still having the same usage problems with this new tech that were the bane of VR back then.<p>Now it seems that once again, interest is waning. The hardware is still way too expensive for most people to come on board. People are still skeptical about what it is, whether it really works, or worried about side effects and other problems. Others simply don't understand the concept of immersion - or if they do, they can't seem to grasp why that would be such a great thing (I find it odd that some can't understand the idea of being -inside- a virtual world - a world of make believe, a world of dreams? One would think that would be something everyone would be gung-ho about, but I guess not).<p>Then to find out Palmer's true side, which - at least to me - wasn't apparent before; conservative, a seeming "I've got mine" attitude (and I don't begrudge his newfound wealth - in fact, I kinda proud for him on that mark), and bro-dude, let's support our favorite cheeto-in-chief...<p>And then the whole Zenimax thing.<p>For me, his reputation has been horribly tarnished. I'm glad he gave the whole VR thing another boost, but at the same time, it looks likely that this is the last great "hoorah" for the technology, and it will likely never get another chance again - at least not in the "gloves and goggles" classic form we've come to associate the term "VR" with.<p>Perhaps that's for the best.