News Detail

Mitchell '05 Turns a Dream Into a (Virtual) Reality

Nate Mitchell ‘05 always knew he wanted to work in video games.
 
There was no life-changing experience, no single epiphany-like moment that made him decide he wanted the gaming industry to be his future. It was just always there.
 
“I knew from my earliest memories that the thing I wanted to do was create games and virtual worlds,” Mitchell said. Fitting then, that Mitchell has gone on to do exactly that as a co-founder of Oculus. The technology company specializes in virtual reality hardware and software, most notably the Rift, a cutting-edge VR headset. In 2014, Facebook acquired Oculus for more than $2 billion in cash and stocks.
 
While it might seem like it on the surface, the journey to make a boyhood dream a reality wasn’t a simple one. Mitchell had to reorient his goals and expectations along the way while overcoming a number of hurdles.
 
“I really struggled in college to find an internship at a game company,” Mitchell said. “The games industry is where all the best programmers in the world gravitate. The work is interesting, cutting edge, benefits are great. Just like the folks at Pixar doing high-end cutting-edge graphics – same research is being done on the game side. The industry is pretty talented, pretty incredible. I was never a great programmer, sort of middle of the road. So getting an internship is something I really struggled with.”
 
Mitchell’s break in software came after graduating from Dickinson College with a B.S. in Computer Science and it came with the help of another St. Andrew’s graduate, Paul iribe ‘05. Paul’s cousin. Brendan Iribe, had co-founded his own middleware company, Scaleform in 1999.
 
“We built technology for game companies to help them build games,” said Mitchell, describing his role as a software support engineer. ‘I had the opportunity to help build UI engines and worked with hundreds if not thousands of developers in creating games.”
 
Based in Greenbelt, Md., Scaleform grew to be the No. 1 video game user interface technology provider during Mitchell’s time there. After working there for two and a half years, Scaleform was sold and became Autodesk. Iribe left at the time but Mitchell stayed on for nearly a year before Iribe convinced him to join him in California at a company called Gaikai, where Iribe was Chief Product Officer. Mitchell was in the role of Senior Product Developer for just a few months when Sony purchased the company.
 
While Mitchell, Iribe and a couple of other Scaleform and Gaikai alumni were considering what to do next, they met Palmer Luckey. Just 19 years old at the time, Luckey had already developed a VR headset and was looking for how to best develop software for it. Mitchell and Iribe came on board and in two weeks helped put together a kickstarter campaign that raised $2 million.
 
“The thing that I saw was, you put your head in this box that he had and there was a whole different world right inside,” Mitchell said. “It’s hard to explain if you haven’t experienced good VR. And this was good VR. What I saw in that first demo was the opportunity to revolutionize the way people experience games, but more than that, computing. That was a really powerful moment. It seemed like the possibilities for VR were suddenly right in front of me. As a super geek and someone who has grown up his whole life in this world, it excited me more than anything else.”
 
Mitchell began at Oculus as Vice President of Product, overseeing both hardware and software. “I’m not the best head of hardware in the world and I’m not the best head of software in the word but I am good at guiding a team through building a project,” Mitchell said. “As the company has grown and we’ve brought in experts, I’ve been able to divest myself of responsibilities.”
 
After 18 months of working at Oculus, everything changed when the acquisition by Facebook was announced.
 
“When we were acquired, we were 75 people,” Mitchell said. “Went from working and managing projects of small team or creating projects yourself to managing hundreds of people.”
 
Despite having more resources, there were still plenty of challenges for Oculus and Mitchell.
 
“There were a lot of problems because the spaces was so new,” Mitchell said. “You can’t go out there and hire a VR team or a VR expert because the industry didn’t exist. So we were bringing in people with a passion and building from scratch.”
 
The need for discovery and collaboration in a new field lent itself perfectly to design thinking. Mitchell said that design has been critical to everything happening at Oculus.
 
“Design is fundamental to what we do,” Mitchell said. “When people think about design, they think about industrial design and one level deeper is UX (user experience). Product development, even with hardware, is about delivering an experience that is magical and delightful and gives them the experience they are looking for. Taking the raw components and craftsmanship and turning it into product is what we are so passionate about.
 
“We have visual designers, UX designers, 3D designers, industrial designers. Oculus is highly cross functional. We’re not building a hard product and we’re not building just software. It’s an integrated platform for other creators to use for their own experience. It requires an incredible amount of collaboration with other disciplines.”
 
With recent changes taking place at Oculus (Luckey announced this spring that he was leaving the company), Mitchell now finds himself as Head of Rift, the VR headset itself. For a kid who wanted to create his own virtual worlds, it’s a dream come true.
 
Back
St. Andrew’s Episcopal School is a private, coeducational college preparatory day school for students in preschool (Age 2) through grade 12, located in Potomac, Maryland.