A US District Judge has ruled that a lawsuit against Oculus VR and its founder Palmer Luckey by Luckey’s former employer may go ahead, at least in part.
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Oculus VR was bought by Facebook for $2 million in 2014 and is also currently undergoing a separate lawsuit from Bethesda/Fallout parent company Zenimax, who claim intellectual property rights over work by former employee and designer John Carmack, who now works at Oculus. The suit alleges that the youthful Luckey used Total Recall’s “proprietary knowledge” to get early versions of Rift going.
He also dismissed other claims levelled at Luckey by Total Recall, including fraud.
The case in U.S. District Court, Northern District of California is Total Recall Technologies vs. Palmer Luckey and Oculus VR, Inc., 15-2281.
Dell’s Alienware department has partnered with Oculus, and they are taking pre-orders for VR-ready machines that come bundled with an Oculus Rift headset – they are also shaving $200 off of the base price if you acquire the bundle.
With his new company, which he founded with Brendan Iribe, Luckey began working on the virtual reality head-mounted display, Oculus Rift. Luckey, on the other hand, issued a statement to Reuters, calling the lawsuit “a brazen attempt to secure for itself a stake in Oculus VR’s recent multi-billion dollar acquisition by Facebook”. One of the main projects that he handled with the Hawaii-based company is a head-mounted display.
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The lawsuit basically hinges on whether the Oculus founder used the ideas and information he learnt at Total Recall to build his own version of the technology. Luckey signed a confidentiality agreement, according to the lawsuit filed previous year. These trade secrets were instrumental in the development of the Oculus Rift VR headset.
