You may not have heard of Falcon Northwest, but if you’ve ever heard of the Oculus Rift than you are already familiar with their work.
Eagle-eyed VR enthusiasts will recognize this bright eyed inventor as none other than Oculus founder (and “father” of modern VR) Palmer Luckey. But wait, what’s that just over his shoulder? Yup, that’s a Falcon PC.
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After clicking through that slideshow your eyebrows should be more than raised, they should be in low orbit. It’s almost impossible to spot a photo from inside Oculus secretive home base without being able to spot a Falcon PC looming in the background like bigfoot with a better GPU.
Despite Falcon’s apparent widespread adoption at Oculus, the company itself has made no mention of an ongoing partnership. I reached out to Falcon representatives who confirmed that there is no codified relationship between their company and Oculus. The VR magnate chose to fill its headquarters with their PCs of its own volition and with little fanfare.
Falcon’s proliferation in the industry doesn’t stop with Oculus either. As you can see from the photos, everyone from indy developers at SVVR to big shots like NVIDIA have a Falcon PC close by.
Falcon has been powering VR for years and nobody knew. Kelt Reeves – Falcon’s president – attributes this to what he calls the “curse of the backwards computer.”
This is his term for the frustrating phenomenon of every Falcon VR developer coincidentally choosing to take his or her production photos from angles that just edged out the branding on the PCs.
“We’ve been behind the scenes of VR forever,” Kelt said. “But until we were named as an official “Oculus Ready” PC, only behind the scenes people even knew…There’s lots more photos out there too, but yeah it’s kind of funny how many VR pictures we’re in if you play ‘Spot the Falcon.'”
In a blog post naming Falcon as an official hardware partner, Oculus itself pointed out the long standing relationship between the two companies:
“We’ve worked with Falcon since the very beginning of Oculus. We built the Oculus platform with Falcon PCs and used their Tikis in nearly every early demo. These are some of the toughest and most beloved PCs among the gaming community. We’re thrilled to welcome them to the program.”
Falcon is based in Medford Oregon and was founded by Kelt in 1992.
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Disclosure: Falcon Northwest is a hardware sponsor of the Upload Collective, a co-working space in San Francisco for AR and VR companies.
