The updated filing, which was reported by Game Informer on Monday, still alleges that Oculus’s major VR technologies were taken from ZeniMax in a way that violated contracts and nondisclosure agreements-especially since Carmack originally worked for ZeniMax and had signed contracts that made ZeniMax the owner of any technologies he worked on within the company (specifically, at its subsidiary, id Software). The suit suggests this is false and that he would have lacked the “training, expertise, resources, or know-how” for “commercially viable” VR technology.
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ZeniMax further accuses Carmack, Luckey and Iribe of being uncooperative with ZeniMax back when Carmack was still under its employ working on a VR headset.
Oculus VR said in a statement that ZeniMax’s claims are one-sided and that it continues to believe the case has no merit.
Game Informer reports that the company now alleges that id Software co-founder and Oculus’ current chief technology Carmack “copied thousands of documents from a computer at ZeniMax to a USB storage device” that were not returned after he left the company. It plans to address the claims in court, which would certainly please ZeniMax. “In addition, after Carmack’s employment with ZeniMax was terminated, he returned to ZeniMax’s premises to take a customized tool for developing VR Technology belonging to ZeniMax that itself is part of ZeniMax’s VR technology”. The story of its founder, Palmer Luckey, was inspiring: a young boy so obsessed with the notion of virtual reality and virtual worlds that he began building his own headsets.
The amended complaint also adds a few Carmack-specific assertions that connect Oculus” success to ZeniMax’s contributions to virtual reality, including the following: “Carmack has admitted that without ZeniMax, Oculus “wouldn’t exist as a funded company.'” And a paragraph in the updated complaint mentions both new defendants by accusing Iribe of directing Oculus employees such as Luckey to contact Carmack in order to “obtain ZeniMax’s VR technology for Oculus’s benefit”. At or about that time, Facebook was provided by Oculus with a copy of the Non-Disclosure Agreement executed by Luckey.
Despite a fair few foibles during its release window, Oculus Rift has finally managed to sort out its stock flow problems.
Rift is also making its way to United Kingdom retailers from 20 September, meaning you can head into a high-street store and snap one up on the same day. Just like with the HTC Vive, customers can go hands on with a Rift in-store before taking the plunge and purchasing one. But the publisher alleges that Luckey provided little to the VR project.
“Oculus used ZeniMax’s hardware and software technology to create a software development kit for the Rift and to develop, modify, and tune the Rift hardware”, reads the complaint.
Oculus’ response to this complaint has not yet been filed in US District Court.
Unlike the HTC Vive and PlayStation VR, Rift makes use of a standard Xbox One controller for playing games.
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Touch works like HTC’s Vive controllers, mapping your hand movements 1:1 in 3D space. What Luckey supposedly did was act as a figurehead for virtual reality with the media and the public.
