Skip to main content

Palmer Luckey pledges $2,000 a month toward the development of ReVive

palmer luckey pledge revive patreon  founder at oculus 5
Image used with permission by copyright holder
In March 2017, Oculus VR co-founder Palmer Luckey parted ways with Facebook in the aftermath of the legal battle between the company and Zenimax over its virtual reality technology. However, it seems that Luckey still has strong opinions regarding how Oculus should operate its Rift platform. Luckey has apparently pledged $2,000 per month to a Patreon campaign supporting the development of ReVive, according to a report from IGN.

The ReVive project is run by Jules Blok, and sets out to make software that’s exclusive to the Oculus Rift headset fully playable on the HTC Vive.

Recommended Videos

“As some of you suspected the sudden extreme jump in the pledge amount is indeed by Palmer Luckey,” Blok wrote in a post published to the ReVive Patreon page. “I’d like to thank him for his pledge and everything he has done for the VR community as a whole.”

Luckey is something of a controversial figure within that portion of the VR community that is on the political left, having earned plenty of goodwill from his peers for his efforts to nurture the technology, ahead of a backlash to his financial support of pro-Trump groups during the 2016 presidential election. Following his exit from Facebook, he has founded a new startup that will develop surveillance technology aimed at the defense industry.

It remains to be seen whether there will be any fallout from his decision to support Blok’s Patreon campaign. While the public presentation of his departure from Facebook painted the split as being amicable, it seems likely that the company would take issue with him funding the project.

Oculus implements a walled-garden approach in order to better compete with the HTC Vive, which is its biggest rival in terms of VR hardware. Luckey has spoken out against this strategy previously, but obviously contributing thousands of dollars to the development of a workaround makes a much more dramatic statement.

It’s easy to see why someone who played a major role in getting VR off the ground would want to see software made available to the widest possible audience, without hardware restrictions. However, given the recent history between Luckey and Facebook, this kind of public donation doesn’t seem like a particularly shrewd move.

Brad Jones
Former Digital Trends Contributor
Brad is an English-born writer currently splitting his time between Edinburgh and Pennsylvania. You can find him on Twitter…
Rest in pieces: Nvidia is finally ditching GeForce Experience for good
The Nvidia app on the Windows desktop.

We've had the Nvidia app for a while, but now, it's available officially. About a year ago, Nvidia launched the Nvidia app into beta as a one-stop-shop for managing some of its best graphics cards, including grabbing new drivers, messing around with different features, and optimizing your game settings. Now, it's out of beta, officially replacing the legacy GeForce Experience and Nvidia Control Panel apps, and with some new features in tow.

One of the biggest draws of the Nvidia app initially was driver downloads. It may seem mundane, but you'd previously need to download GeForce Experience and create an Nvidia account for GPU driver updates. If you didn't, you'd have to search and install your drivers manually. The Nvidia app gives you access to new drivers, and notifies you when they're ready, all without an Nvidia login. Now, signing in is optional for "bundles and rewards" offered by Nvidia.

Read more
Microsoft is, once again, trying to force users into using Edge
Microsoft Edge on a laptop on a couch.

Microsoft has deployed no shortage of tactics to get Windows users onto its Edge browser, and although some of the more nefarious methods of trying to force users to pick up the browser have failed, the company is still experimenting with new methods. The latest route launches Edge automatically on your PC on startup and prompts users to continually import data from Chrome, including your history, bookmarks, and tabs.

Richard Lawler from The Verge spotted the prompt, which showed up earlier this year without explanation before disappearing. It's back now, and in an official capacity from Microsoft. "This is a notification giving people the choice to import data from other browsers," said Microsoft's Caitlin Roulston in a statement to The Verge.

Read more
M4 chip: here’s everything we know about Apple’s latest silicon
The Apple M4 series chips, including the M4, M4 Pro and M4 Max against a black background.

With the launch of the latest iMac, the redesigned Mac mini and the souped-up MacBook Pro, Apple has just unveiled new Macs equipped with its latest M4 chip, which brings more powerful performance and extra features to its computers. But this won't be the first time the M4 has made an appearance -- it's already out in the latest iPad Pro.

Is the M4 chip any good? Should you upgrade your Mac or iPad to take advantage of it? And what new features does it bring to your devices? We've set out to answer these questions and more, blending together what we've learned from the M4 Macs and the iPad Pro with information sourced in our own reviews. That should give you everything you need to know about Apple's latest chip.
Price and release date

Read more