Prototype

The first thing people noticed about Colt Massey was the blood. It was coming from his nose, running down his chin in a thin red line, dripping onto the Hawaiian shirt he’d been wearing for three days straight. The second thing they noticed — if they stuck around long enough, which most didn’t — was that he didn’t seem to care.

He was standing in the living room of the trailer, which was also the dining room, which was also the place where his three sisters watched television and his mother graded math worksheets for the homeschool co-op. The trailer was a double-wide in a park off Pacific Coast Highway in Long Beach, California, and it smelled like soldering flux and microwave burritos and the particular ozone tang of electronics that have been recently taken apart.

Colt had a headset strapped to his face. He had built it himself from the guts of three different devices: the display panel from a broken phone he’d bought on eBay for twelve dollars, the motion sensor from a Wii remote he’d liberated from a Goodwill bin, and the housing from a pair of ski goggles that his youngest sister had outgrown. The whole thing was held together with duct tape, electrical tape, and a rubber band that was doing structural work no rubber band should be asked to do.

The blood was from walking into the wall. He’d been testing the headset’s field of view — ninety-three degrees, wider than anything commercially available, a number he’d calculated from the lens geometry and confirmed by the fact that he could see peripheral movement in the display — and he’d forgotten that virtual space and physical space were not the same thing. The virtual room was larger than the living room. His body had followed the virtual room. The wall had disagreed.

His sister Katie, who was fourteen and possessed the particular cruelty of younger siblings who sense weakness, had filmed the impact on her phone. She was already composing a text to send to their other sisters. Colt pulled the headset off, looked at the blood on his fingers, and looked at the display.

“The tracking held,” he said.

“Your face didn’t,” Katie said.

“The tracking held through a collision event. The accelerometer didn’t clip. Did you see that? The image stayed stable the whole way down.”

“Colt. You’re bleeding on the carpet.”

He looked down. He was. “Can you get me a paper towel?”

Katie got him a paper towel. He pressed it to his nose with one hand and, with the other, began unscrewing the housing to check whether the impact had shifted the lens alignment. His mother appeared in the doorway of the kitchen, assessed the situation with the practiced calm of a woman who had been assessing Colt-related situations for sixteen years, and said: “If you’re going to bleed, bleed in the garage.”

The garage was Colt’s real home. It was a single-car structure attached to the trailer, and it contained no car. What it contained was: forty-seven broken VR headsets in various states of disassembly, acquired over two years from eBay, garage sales, and a military surplus auction in San Bernardino. Eight monitors, three of which worked. A soldering station his mother had given him for his fifteenth birthday. Bins of components — lenses, sensors, circuit boards, cables — organized with a system that made sense only to Colt. A folding table that served as his workbench. A mini-fridge that contained Mountain Dew and nothing else. And, taped to the wall above the workbench, a printout of an article from a 1995 issue of Wired magazine about a company called VPL Research, which had tried to make virtual reality mainstream and failed.

The article was there as a reminder. Not of failure — of proximity. VPL had been close. The technology had almost worked. The displays were almost good enough, the tracking was almost fast enough, the price was almost low enough. “Almost” was the word that defined the history of VR: forty years of almost, from Ivan Sutherland’s 1968 head-mounted display to Nintendo’s disastrous Virtual Boy to the hundred-million-dollar labs that produced prototypes nobody could afford.

Colt believed he could close the gap. Not because he was smarter than the engineers at those labs — he probably wasn’t, though he’d never admit it — but because he had a different relationship with the problem. They were trying to build VR from the top down: start with the theory, design the perfect system, engineer the hardware to match. Colt built from the bottom up: start with whatever junk he could find, make it work, figure out why it worked, and then make it work better.

The approach was messy, empirical, and looked from the outside like a teenager playing with broken electronics. From the inside, it was the most disciplined thing Colt had ever done.

He took the headset to the garage, set it on the workbench, and began taking it apart. The nosebleed had stopped. The lens alignment was fine. The tracking data, saved on a laptop that was older than Katie, showed a clean signal through the entire impact event.

Ninety-three degrees. Stable tracking. Under five hundred dollars in parts.

Nobody in the world had built anything close to this.

Colt didn’t know that yet — not with certainty, not with the kind of data that would convince anyone outside this garage. He knew it the way he knew most things: intuitively, in the hands, in the particular feeling of holding a piece of technology and understanding, without being able to fully explain it, that it was better than it was supposed to be.

He put the headset back together. He strapped it on. He stood in the middle of the garage and looked around the virtual room — a simple 3D environment he’d coded himself, gray walls and a checkered floor, ugly as sin — and felt the thing that had hooked him at thirteen and had not let go since: the feeling of being somewhere else. Not watching a screen. Being in a place that didn’t exist.

His phone buzzed. A notification from the VR enthusiast forum he’d been posting on since he was fifteen, under a pseudonym that everyone there assumed belonged to a grad student. The notification was a new post from an admin:

“Challenge: Build an HMD with 90+ degree FOV for under $500. Full tracking. Low latency. If you can do it, DM me. I’ll fund it.” — RajV

Colt read it twice. Then he looked at the headset on his face. Ninety-three degrees. Full tracking. Under five hundred dollars.

He took the headset off and started typing.

* * *