Remember Virtual Reality? I do. When I was a kid cartoons, movies, and even theme parks were all abuzz about VR. The last time I heard anything about Virtual Reality was Nintendo's Virtual Boy. The VB did a good job of mimicing those helmets, in design anyway. It definitely looks like some VR goggles. Even if all it did was allow you to see what amounted to Gameboy games in 3-D.
Well wouldn't now be the best time for Virtual Reality? We've got some sophisitacted control schemes and some damn impressive graphics. Back in the mid 90's all the best super advanced VR looked like a couple texture free polygons.
Just think how cool it'd be to have a VR headset spitting out HD ps3/xbox 360 visuals with your Natal and ps3 motion controller based interactions! Now the possibilities are endless but no one even remembers VR. I guess the Virtual Boy hurt its repuation that bad. What a shame.
Virtual Reality, where'd that go?
On
Thursday, October 15, 2009
1 comments
1 comments:
I wouldn't say that the Virtual Boy hurt it's reputation, by that time the whole idea of virtual reality was starting to wear thin. The truth is, the moment people started seeing 3D games (specifically 3D first-person shooters), that's when they realized that maybe we didn't need a huge thing on your head.
There's also the problem of price. Let's be honest, to make something like that work properly, it was going to cost these companies far more than just making a regular game. And are they going to have more than one game for it? Are you going to be tied to a system? How is it going to work? Will people actually want it? It turns out that it was too expensive and people didn't really want it.
Both Atari and Sega had VR displays at the Consumer Electronic Show in the early 1990s. I tried both units and found both to be awful. They claimed that they had a lot of work to do, but I wasn't convinced they could ever make it work right. It turns out that I was right. In this world of Natal and 3D polygons, do we really need to put something on our heads that will potentially hurt our eyes?
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