Whatever happened to Virtual Reality?

[RigaMortus2]

They still have VR games at Dave and Busters. There is a kick ass MechWarrior type game.

 

[Merkuri]

Heh. I'm no engineer, but you'd think they would suspend those cables from the ceiling. *shrug*

They did. Kind of. The pole was holding up the structure that the cables were attached to. I think the actual ceiling was too high to hang the cables from directly.

 

[frankthedm]

Folks were big on the VR idea until home PCs became a mainstay and they realized how BAD of an idea connecting thier BRAIN to one would be. I'll not give mircosoft the chance to make the Blue Screen of Death a literal truth.

 

[Phoenix8008]

VR is still coming. The tech is slowly happening. I can't wait to have a Danger Room though!

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Or, if you like Shadowrun better, we can look forward to Augmented Reality in the not too distant future it seems...

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[SKyOdin]

I actually tried on a couple 3-D headsets at the Game Developer's Conference. Neither one of them was very good (and one in particular was downright awful). I think it will still take a few more years for immersive VR technology to be ironed out.

 

[Aeolius]

I think it will still take a few more years for immersive VR technology to be ironed out.

And there are others who are trying to do away with the HMD altogether:
Apple Researching 3D Stereoscopic Displays

 

[WayneLigon]

Well, what happened? It never came to pass and nobody really ever talks about it anymore. Is it a dead technology?

As it was written at the time, yeah, it's as dead as holograms. No-one can make a lightweight headset that contain all the tech needed and even if you could, you still need something to recreate mass, weight and the sensation of movement. Most writers soon realized that a direct-brain interface was much more useful and probably more possible.

 

[Vocenoctum]

Aside from the weight of the headset, I found that most of the VR stuff just lacked the simple principle of eye dominance. Same way with 3d, the images are out of sync with each other, and it can simulate distance, except for certain areas of the screen where the "sync" just isn't in line with what your eyes would see at that distance. Eyes give depth perception because one eye is looking straight and the other is at an angle, in general, so figuring the angle always seems too tough for mass production.

Plus, the problem of having glasses, and I think a lot of them are just not close enough to the eye.

It may not be real "virtual reality", but it would add to lots of games I think. One of the things with FPS's is the lack of peripheral vision. It could add to the experience in a "master chief" style helmet clad warrior, you can get the full view better, sort of...

 

[Darth Shoju]

I did some work experience with a local VR company when I was in highschool. They made VR helmets, and their claim to fame was having their product appear in an episode of Seaquest: DSV. I believe it was around 1995 when I was there, and I was pretty disappointed with the technology (though the people were awesome. They took two hour lunches ever day: one hour for lunch, one hour for deathmatch Doom 2 or Rise of the Triad). The helmets weren't terribly heavy, but the screens weren't wraparound. Rather, they were a small screen that sat about 3-4 inches in front of your eyes. You controlled movement with a controller that looked like a joystick with no base, that used a weighted motion-senser in the handle to control movement (tilting forward, back, side, etc). I was particularly disappointed that the software they used to demo it was Doom 2 which, as fun as it was, wasn't my idea of virtual reality. They did have another program where you could walk around in a "3-d" kitchen and open cupboards and turn on the faucet, but we never got to use it with the headsets, and frankly it paled in comparison to what you could do in your average video game just a few years later.

I think the whole VR thing will likely be more like this in the near future, until that whole brain interface thing is worked out:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jd3-eiid-Uw

 

[ssampier]

The goofy googles/helmet and awkward gloves killed it. The apps on it were hardly revolutionary.

I want a interface similar to the interface "walls" in Minority Report; objects just fly in and out quickly. It is quite similar to the existing GUI, but without the monitor and pc paradigm. I think it has some ergonomics issues though.