"In September 2012, I got an email out of the blue from Jack McCauley, from a VR company that was founded two months earlier by a 19-year-old named Palmer Luckey. Oculus VR had just closed a successful Kickstarter campaign and needed to make head tracking work for the Oculus Rift in a hurry. Jack was googling for things like "quaternions" and "Euler angles" and found my Planning Algorithms book. I was just about to refer them to some industry-oriented colleagues, but contemplated my family financial worries, including paying for my eventual children's university tuition, retirement funds, and rising medical costs. I naively thought a successful startup could fix that. Before too long, I was their chief scientist, where I developed patented tracking technology for consumer virtual reality, and led a team of perceptual psychologists to provide principled approaches to virtual reality system calibration, health and safety, and the design of comfortable user experiences. By March 2014, Facebook agreed to buy the company for $3 billion. I guess I was lucky in my first industry experience! The overall story is nicely told in this book by Blake Harris."
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Steven M. LaValle
Steven M. LaValle (born 1968 in St. Louis, Missouri) is an American computer scientist, and a professor in the Faculty of Information Technology and Electrical Engineering at the University of Oulu. He was also an early founder and head scientist of Oculus VR until it was acquired by Facebook in 2014. He is best known for his work on rapidly exploring random trees (RRTs), the Oculus Rift, and his book, Planning Algorithms, one of the most highly cited texts in the field.
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