I wasn't sure that this was still going on - sadly I guess it is.
I find zenimax's claims that Palmer didn't invent anything to be spurious at best; I was following what Palmer was doing on the MTBS3D forums for a couple of years before the Kickstarter was launched.
He's been hacking on this tech for a long time. He was taking old-school HMDs from the 1990s and upgrading them, experimenting with optics and displays - ultimately perfecting them into what would become the prototype of the Rift.
I've played around with DIY VR since the early 1990s - and I've collected many of the same HMDs Palmer was experimenting with. I've got a few hacked power gloves (sadly, I don't have a Menelli box - but the parallel port hack works great; there's even a linux driver, now), some old VFX-1 HMDs, a Cybermaxx, etc. I even have a complete set of the PCVR magazine before it folded. I played with REND386 and AVRIL back in the day. I even got some crap working on my Amiga 1200 (using AMOS 3D).
In short - I knew when I saw what Palmer was up to, that he was the "real deal", and that of anyone, he had the best chance of bringing VR into a "second revival" - which is why I backed the Kickstarter. I may not agree with what has happened post FB money (I'm really disappointed that official linux driver support has been relegated to the bin of history), but I still believe the company to be legit when it comes to the claim of invention.
For zenimax to say that Palmer couldn't have invented this stuff in his "garage" is pure rubbish - many people in the 1990s were hacking VR in their garages, on their kitchen tables, and at the PCs in their bedrooms. You had to, if you wanted inexpensive VR. Furthermore, it doesn't take much to plop a couple of cheap fresnel lenses in front of a couple of old Casio portable pocket TVs to get up-and-running. PCVR and Presence magazine both had articles on how to configure optics and build homebrew HMDs; the tech isn't exactly rocket science.
Where Palmer got lucky (no pun intended) was being at the right place, at the right time, and being one of the few people in the world at the time still experimenting around with low-cost homebrew VR (compared to the 1990s, there were only a handful in the world doing it post-2010). The tech finally came around (because of smartphones) for low-cost, high-resolution, small, lightweight LCDs - the kind of display we could only dream about back in the 1990s. He was positioned perfectly to take advantage of this - and he did.
