Apple’s John Ternus is a 25-year veteran of the tech giant, but one of his first engineering gigs was at a lesser-known company building virtual reality headsets.
Defense startup founder and Oculus headset creator Palmer Luckey reminisced on X about a product that Ternus, who is set to become Apple’s CEO in September, might’ve had a hand in during his early engineering days.
Luckey posted a photo of an old V8 head mount display from Virtual Research.
“From what I can tell, he was the lead mechanical engineer on the V8 I obtained when I was 16!,” Luckey wrote, referring to Ternus.
John Ternus, the new CEO of Apple, has been with the company for 25 years. His only non-Apple job was four years in the late 90s at Virtual Research, a tiny Virtual Reality HMD outfit.From what I can tell, he was the lead mechanical engineer on the V8 I obtained when I was 16! pic.twitter.com/qfc8Uxg9ux
— Palmer Luckey (@PalmerLuckey) April 26, 2026
“It was an incredible headset for the time,” Luckey told Business Insider.
He described the headset as well-balanced and relatively lightweight, with a field of vision that was ahead of that of other consumer products at the time. It mainly sold to military flight simulators for around $50,000, Luckey said.
Ternus and Apple did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
A user guide for the V8 published online suggests the model was released in 1998, when Ternus would’ve been working at the company. He was an engineer at Virtual Research from 1997 to 2001, and joined Apple later that year, according to his LinkedIn profile.
A patent filed in 1995 and issued in 1998, during Ternus’s time at Virtual Research, describes a similar-looking product, a virtual display apparatus for use in a virtual reality system. It supported the attachment of video displays.
Ternus is best known today as Apple’s hardware boss, notably for working on AirPods and the iPad among other products, and as the incoming CEO.
His appointment marks the return to a product-minded chief like Steve Jobs. Current CEO Tim Cook’s background is in operations.
The tech giant made its debut in the high-tech headset market in 2024 with the Vision Pro, which received a lukewarm response from the public. Its $3,500 price tag and lack of a killer app didn’t wow consumers. At that point, Ternus had been in the senior vice president of hardware engineering role for three years.
Despite an underwhelming response to the Vision Pro, execs like Cook and Ternus remain optimistic about the product and the future of VR.
“Vision Pro is an extraordinary product,” Ternus said in a Tom’s Guide interview earlier this month. “It’s like we reached into the future and pulled it into the present.”
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