TIME's Virtual Reality Magazine Cover

Submission 27,099

Part of a series on Virtual Reality / VR. [View Related Entries]

About

TIME's Virtual Reality Magazine Cover refers to the cover of an August 2015 issue of TIME magazine, which featured Oculus founder Palmer Luckey wearing an Oculus Rift head set and standing with his arms outstretched. The image subsequently inspired the creation of a photoshop meme, in which a cut out of Luckey is superimposed into a variety of base images.

Origin

On August 6th, 2015, TIME unveiled the cover for their upcoming issue focusing on virtual reality technology and the Oculus Rift device (shown below).^[1] Additionally, the official Twitter account for TIME then tweeted an animated version of the cover.^[2]

That same day, Twitter user Ryan Evans^[10] tweeted a photoshopped image featuring a cut out of Luckey riding a horse in the middle of a field (shown below). Within 24 hours, the tweet gained over 200 retweets and 200 favorites.

Spread

The same day it was released, Redditor C-Ron submitted the cover to the /r/CrappyDesign^[11] subreddit, where it garnered more than 6,100 votes (94% upvoted) and 380 comments. Meanwhile, Redditor vrnate submitted the cover to the /r/photoshopbattles^[12] subreddit, where many users submitted digitally edited versions of the image. Also on August 6th, Twitter user @PellyNV^[14] tweeted a photoshopped picture of Luckey being held by actor Leonardo DiCaprio in the 1997 film Titanic (shown below, left) and Redditor Tidus5005 submitted a version of the cover with Luckey seated on a toilet to /r/funny^[13] (shown below, right).

That evening, Time^[9] published a compilation featuring 37 notable examples of the photoshop meme. In the coming days, several news sites published articles about the online reaction to the magazine cover, including Forbes,^[3] VG24/7,^[4] The Daily Dot,^[16] The Huffington Post^[17] and Tech Crunch.^[7] The following day Machinima ETC's parody gaming news show TUGS released an episode which featured a segment dedicated to the TIME cover as well as the article within (shown below, left). On August 9th, 2015, YouTuber DamoVR uploaded a compilation of several of the different Photoshop edits, while the audio from He-Man Sings plays in the background (shown below, right).