V-Rtifacts » Head Mounted Displays

How To Buy LCDs (in 1995)

Tone — Mon, 26 Jul 2010 13:03:08 +0000

Jeremy Oliver advises how to purchase LCD displays for your next homebrew VR helmet. (Hint: take all your optics to Montgomery Wards and try every TV and camcorder on the shelf!)

Jeremy’s less than successful experience with Radio Shack suggests a big thumbs down, but what did I know; my first DIY leveraged their Pocketvision-27 (still wondering about models 1-26?)

And now I’ll turn the podium over to Jeremy:

Dear Dreamer and Garage VR Enthusiasts:

DO NOT USE LCDs from the Sega GameGear and/or the Atari Lynx. They are not NTSC compatible. The GameGear can be made NTSC compatible with the TV tuner that is an accessory sold separatedly but you will find that you are paying more than for most pocket LCD TVs in the market. Besides if you went ahead and use a pair of Sega GameGear as viewers for a HMD, I am sure that you will be displease by the coarse resolution. The Atari Lynx has more res than the GameGear but it is still inadequate for VR immersion.

Using a pair of VictorMaxx Stuntmaster would work but the resolution is even worse.

DO NOT BUY LCDs from Radio Shack. I am sorry that if some of you would disagree with me on this but I am talking from experience. One of my first HMD was built from hi-res 3.3″ LCDs I hacked from some pocket TVs I bought from Radio Shack and now it doesn’t work because I can’t find replacement parts that only Radio Shack sold. I lost about $170 because some small surface mounted diodes and transistors were damaged by my novice soldering skills.

I then lost $30 to long distance phone calls pursuing these parts all over America and even Japan. I could have easily fixed my damaged TV sets if only Radio Shack was cooperative of giving me the neccessary information I would have needed to make my own power supply to run the LCDs. This information I seeked was just the values of a handful of crucial surface mounted devices. Now Radio Shack does not have 85% of the parts I would have needed if the damage was worse. That is why I say don’t buy from Radio Shack.

STICK WITH THE MAJOR BRANDS like Sony, Casio, JVC, Sharp, etc. They manufacture their own products and you have a better chance finding parts from them down the road when you may need them (the backlight for example).

HOW TO PICK LCDs:

Go to your local elctronics stores and check out anything with LCDs (e.g. pocket TVs, camcorders, and even laptops). Really examine these LCDs if you don’t care what others think take your optics with you. I would stand in Montgomery Wards really eyeballing the LCD TVs and camcorders with my assortment of fresnel, arcrylic, glass lenses.

Once you make your list, get in contact with as many technicians/TV repairmen you can who are knowledgeable of LCD products. Ask them what is the complexity of disassembling these LCD products from their housing and modifying them to lightweight and still functional. Then ask if they have the service manuals to these LCD products in their shops so that you can hopefully see them for yourself.

Service manuals that have many illustrations and schematics will save you alot time, money, and heartaches. DO NOT BUY any LCDs without looking at its service manual. This will give you an idea how to strategically disassemble/modify the LCD product for HMD use. Also try to milk the technician for as much information as possible, I learn more about electronics and video technologies from all the technicians I have met that reading a good book. They probably can probably give you some better ideas too

Now call the manufacturers for prices of the LCDs, all neccessary parts to give it a composite video signal, and the servie manual. Try to find out how many years these parts will be available. I highly advise that you don’t buy soon to be discontinued products because of the uncertainty of available parts.

Once you decide what LCD to use make sure you want to go along and build a HMD because no matter what you still going to spend some money and invest alot of your time putting it together into a decent working HMD. Really think it over

If you decide to do it…I am with you every step of the way. If you have any questions just e-mail me. I even have some circuits that you can put together that will enhance the performance of your HMD.

OH DARN

I forgot to discuss the use of VGA LCDs as viewers for HMD….well you probably have an idea what I was going to say. If any of you want me to go into that possiblity, feel free to e-mail with that your request. I pretty sure that I have pissed of some of you with this large byte letter…..I just hope that it was very helpful to some.

Sincerely,

Jeremy Oliver foliver@lonestar.utsa.edu

From: “Frank J. Oliver ”
Newsgroups: sci.virtual-worlds
Subject: Re: TECH: Sega Game Gear LCDs
Date: Mon, 25 Sep 1995 20:00:21 -0500
Organization: The University of Texas at San Antonio
Message-Id:

Attack of the Avatar (Show)

Tone — Fri, 16 Jul 2010 12:58:51 +0000

Trust the folks at G4 to bring us the real scoop on state-of-the-art VR from the inventors of the assembly line, Ford Motor Company. G4′s reportage AND Ford’s VR applications are both impressive; both the MSM and GM/Chrysler have something to learn here. G4 traditionally (is that an oxymoron??) sticks with the latest video games and gadgets on Attack of the Show, but at Ford they seem to have out done GTA. Watch!

Urinated in His Pants?

Is VR the New Wasteland? (from 1993….)

Tone — Wed, 07 Jul 2010 13:16:01 +0000

VR today is like early TV: it suffers from the split personality of most start-up high-tech industries. At the one end is the top of the line research, carried out by institutions with no mandate to sell anything. At the other end, we have new hardware and software products whose developers are only too happy to demo them at a plethora of VR conferences, but where the differences in product are less important than the similarities. It’s like having a VCR and no movies to rent: who needs it? Virtual Reality will continue as the domain of media hype until its supporters and developers start to pay closer attention to the content of what they put out.

Ira Meistrich in Pix-Elation Issue Vol II No II

17 years later, is the situation drastically transformed? Perhaps not. In many ways 1993 was the golden age of VR, not only because the systems were truly immersive (e.g. wide field of view HMDs), but there were some complete VR experiences, especially from W Industries. OK, maybe it was the bronze age, not the golden, but it seems like we’re now back in the stone age. What happened? And… does anyone remember what a VCR is?

You Put on Your Helmet One Morning and Find Yourself Transformed Into a Monstrous ******?

Tone — Wed, 07 Jul 2010 12:56:16 +0000

Yes, I’ve heard rumors of bugs (lice) inside VR helmets (untrue!), but researchers in Spain are bloody Kafkaesque, putting virtual cockroaches all over the screens. They “got the bright idea to simulate hoards of cockroaches swarming over insect-phobic volunteers…”, showing that “roaches could skitter, wave their antenna, and even change size from small and medium to hideously large.”

Read the full scoop on these virtual critters.

W Industries – In the Beginning…

Tone — Tue, 06 Jul 2010 15:11:13 +0000

Chris Hand from Leicester Polytechnic offers a delightful history of W Industries, the company who brought us the various Virtuality VR game systems. His history begins in the early 80′s and takes us only to early October of 1991, not long after the commercial introduction of Virtuality’s Series 1000 Amiga based systems.

The excerpts below offer a taste of the VR buzz in 1991, but take the time to read the entire history!

A video clip from an early 80′s episode of the BBC TV programme “Tomorrow’s World” showed some of the early work of Dr Waldern. The “Roaming Caterpillar” (as it was known) was shown being used by presenter Maggie Philbin to examine a virtual room. The display was a large B/W monitor with handles on each side, supported by a flexible arm on castors covered by a concertina of rubber (the “caterpillar”). The image displayed was a wire-frame view of the “contents” of the (actually empty) room. The location of the monitor was sensed by 3 fixed speakers emitting audible clicks in a fixed sequence, with the time taken to reach microphones being used to calculate the distance. It was also possible to detect the position of the user’s fingers by wearing tubes on them, with microphones and wires attached to a control unit. By pinching her fingers together in the right place, the presenter picked up the receiver of a virtual telephone and left it suspended in space.

Their second HMD, another tethered system, was known as the “giraffe”. This featured mechanical 2D head-tracking.

The fourth device to be built was much slimmer, featuring a magnetic head-tracker and twin LCD screens. It is of interest to note that the head-mounted part of the device allowed for adjustment of inter-occular spacing. At the time it was thought that the correct adjustment of this distance to suit each viewer would be vital to the stereoscopic effect. Mr Rowley pointed out that it was later found not to be so important, as long as the exit pupil of the optics was made large enough.

In November 1990 the “Stand-Up” unit was launched at the Computer Graphics 90 exhibition staged at London’s Alexandra Palace. At the same time the parent company went into liquidation, but fortunately W Industries had been sold just prior to this to another company, which also owns the Wembley Stadium in London.

LEEP On The Cheap

Tone — Mon, 14 Jun 2010 01:04:32 +0000

Build your own LEEP style wide field of view head mounted display optics. Check out the instruction video and parts list below.

In the late 80′s and early 90′s wide field of view head mounted displays were all the rage; immersion was everything! The dominant HMD vendors, VPL Research and Virtual Research shared the same optical implementation: lenses from LEEP Systems. These wide angle optics (designed by Eric Howlett of LEEP), coupled with 2″ or 3″ LCD screens really did deliver a totally immersive visual experience…except that the resolution of the LCDs were so low that under this extreme magnification each pixel looked like a football; you were swimming is a sea of colored footballs!

LCD Screens and LEEP Optics

By the mid 90′s (and up to the present) a primary design criteria for head mounted displays was small size and light weight. Indeed there are entire head mounts that weigh only a few ounces and look almost like sunglasses. Sadly, immersion and wide field of view were abandoned. The new generation of head mounts had 20 – 30 deg. field of view. You felt like you were looking through a distant window.

For reasons which I will cover in a forthcoming post, wide field of view and small/light head mounted displays are mutually exclusive. Anatomy and physics bars the way.

Almost 20 years ago I demoed an early Virtual Research Flight Helmet complete with LEEP optics. Being very impressed but unwilling to drop six grand into my first head mount, I set about building my own. The Radio Shack LCD TVs that I found were very similar to the Sony TVs in the Flight Helmet and I set about installing everything in a Friday The 13th style hockey mask. The optics were my biggest challenge, but the answer was buried in Eric Howlett’s LEEP patent, not as a claim, but as a demonstration of how to achieve wide FOV with conventional optics.

So… here’s a brief video recreating that optical design from 1991. I’ve cheated a bit by using my Android phone as the LCD screen, but otherwise the optical path is essentially the same. Aside from the phone, there’s about $25 in parts for a single eyepiece and it can display almost 90 deg. (diag.) field of view. The lens mounting is extra cheesy, but it demonstrates the optics quite well, and only takes 5 min. to assemble. So without further ado…

Click here to view the embedded video.

In the video I mention that someone needs to write an Android application to make it into a fully tracked head mount. After editing the video I remembered and tried out a couple of popular Android apps: Google Sky and Layar, both of which use the position sensors for a full 3D view. They work great with this lens system!

Parts List:

Anchor Optics Plano Convex Lens AX73280 42.5mm dia. x 77.0mm FL – $7.00 (Eyepiece)
Anchor Optics Double Convex Lens AX73424 62.8mm dia. x 72.4mm FL – $13,50 (Objective)
2″ PVC Coupler
Small Sheet of Polystyrene plastic – 0.030 Black Sheet

If you were building this for real, you’d spray paint all the plastic parts to a black matte finish. LEEP also beveled the edges of the eyepiece lenses to make a better fit with the nose. To reduce weight, switch from glass lenses to CR39 plastic lenses.

If you assemble 2 of these with LCDs, you may find that the eyepieces are too far apart to match your eye spacing. Simply turn the two optical assemblies so that the LCDs point slightly outward and the eyepieces come closer together. Then apply 3M Press-On Fresnel Prisms.

Build Your Own Fluid-based Prismatic Stereoscopic Goggles

Mnemonic — Thu, 27 May 2010 14:54:05 +0000

For 150 years people have been free-viewing stereoscopic photos (and more recently videos) in a side by side cross-eyed format, where the left view is positioned to the right of the right view. You’re force to cross your eyes like an optical contortionist. For eyeballs with less agility, this can become painful. By using prisms in front of each eye, the eye strain is eliminated. Here’s a truly unique DIY method for building such a viewer on the cheap.

Finished Goggles

Back In The USSR

Mnemonic — Thu, 29 Apr 2010 13:50:51 +0000

VFX-3D Head Mounted Display

USA and other western world faced consumer-focused Virtual Reality boom in late 80s and early 90s, accurately when USSR is fall apart. VR came to big industrial cities of post USSR later in 1995 – 1998, when VR hype slowly begin to fall down in USA. That was in a few years after IBM-compatible PC’s settled down in Russia, Ukraine and other countries. PC’s are finally moved aside ZX Spectrum platform which was most popular home computer in late eighties and early nineties here.

ELSA Revelator shutter-glasses

Consumer VR started with ELSA Revelator shutter glasses, Forte VFX-1, and i-Glasses HMD’s (which are still can be found from time to time in private geek collections).

These devices had much higher price here than in USA (with more than two-times higher cost), multiply this with poor level of life in after-perestroyka times, and it’s became obvious that only reach geeks were able to buy such stuff for home use, other soviet-born hackers and cyberpunks only dreamed about VR, not to mention other peoples.

According to these articles (in Russian):

CompuLink was the first in the queue for VFX1 (ComputerWorld)
The system VFX1 as a window into the virtual reality (PC-Week)

Forte VFX1 Introduction in Moscow

In 1995 Moscow company – Compulink signed contact with Forte to be exclusive reseller of VFX-1 in post-USSR countries. They settled the starting price in 1495 USD for a helmet and, as they say, in a first five days sold 25 units.

There were few attempts to make VR-arcades on base of VFX-1 helmet and some 486’s or early Pentium PC’s. Such setups were made by particular enthusiasts and placed in computer-clubs which were like modern internet-cafes but gaming-oriented. Main games played with VR were: DOOM, Heretic, Duke Nukem, Descent, Magic Carpet, Comanche-3, and later – Quake 1.

State of customer-VR at that time combined with early desktop games not always satisfied player’s expectations, and highly viable misconception was born – “VR is fun but it can hurt your eyes and your mind, and you can’t use it for serious gaming”.

Particularly we had a few of such VR arcades here in Ukraine, but they lived for a short time, and very soon they disappeared. Even newer VR hardware (like VFX-3D, P5 data gloves) and newer games didn’t save the tendency.

VFX-3D caged in a computer club

Virtual Reality technology at post-USSR in nineties was so unusual, rare and expensive, that only very small amount of people actually tried it. Still in our time many people here, even technically educated, think of this technology only from sci-fi point of view, not like this technology does really exists. They saw movies like “Lawnmower Man” and “Johnny Mnemonic” and that’s it, VR is only a concept from these movies for most peoples here.

Small publicity and wrong understanding of technology leads generally to ignoring of VR by scientific institutes in post-USSR countries. In opposite to western-world (USA and Europe) there were no VR labs in technical Universities, and still we don’t have any. Students of technical specialties even don’t know about VR psychological studies, 3D User Interfaces, industrial VR, or other specific threads of big scientific tree that was born by VR itself. Only realtime-graphics is widely known because game-industry context.

Virtusphere

However few Russian scientists were engaged with Virtual Reality in nineties, among them Ray and Nurulla Latipovs, two brothers that invented Virtusphere – VR locomotion device. Yet they were able to build device and business in USA.

Some people that get in touch with VR at earlier times found internet-communities that were intended to be VR communities (like Really.Ru ); however they very quickly turned to communities of only stereoscopic enthusiasts. These communities recently received fresh blood with new world-wide “Avatar” 3D hype. Nowadays most popular HMD’s among VR enthusiasts of post USSR countries are eMagin Z800, new iGlasses i-3PC, Vuzix VR920, and Saibex 3D640.

Russian manufactured panoramic shutter-glasses “Stel 3DS-GS”

Mostly, people concentrated on stereoscopy itself and prefer to buy shutter-glasses with proper monitors, or projection systems. As example of “made in Russia” tech – in early 2000 corporation Stel located at Moscow presented their stereoscopic shutter glasses with very “unusual” panoramic design named “Stel 3DS-GS”.

Funniest thing with recent 3D hype in Ukraine, is that most popular 3D tech now is seems to be anaglyph, you can buy it almost everywhere, sometimes by ridiculous prices. You can even buy red-blue conversion of classical 2D movies, such as Francis Ford Coppola’s “The Godfather”.

New Russian military helicopter stereoscopic HMD (designed for Mi-28)

Actually VR in limited aspects is used now internally in R&D of some big companies and in military purposes, but this rather exception than common rule.

Editor’s note: The authors are principals at the pioneering Ukraine VR firm VRM. The IEEE prize winning team of Maxim Lysak and Viktor Kuropyatnik specialize in VR, User Interfaces, and Simulation.

The City and the Stars – VR a Billion Years From Now!

Tone — Mon, 26 Apr 2010 18:59:08 +0000

Back when VR really had some cred, the Diaspar Virtual Reality Network hopped on the bandwagon. Imagine, if you will, a dial-up service with a feature list, every item containing the phrase “will be”, as in this feature will be available… but when? Yes, its somewhat ironic that the network is named “Diaspar”, as this is Arthur C. Clarke’s vision of a city some one billion years in the future, as in: “Diaspar will be a great city for hype-meisters…”

: Arthur C. Clarke’s Tale of One Billion Years Into the Future

OK, to be fair, Diaspar did promise some sort of shared virtual worlds (based on Rend386 and your dial-up connection), but that trebled the per hour cost of the service. And yes, they had an online store where you could buy a VictorMaxx StuntMaster HMD (we’re getting closer to the hype now!), but its not clear how the helmet ties into their future interactive offerings. Pricing is shown below, or click on it to see the entire product slick.

10 Reasons Why Virtual Reality Did Not Become a Standard

fronzel — Sun, 18 Apr 2010 15:55:55 +0000

So well you probably know that it is not a standard that new computers get shipped with VR headsets, although you might have believed that during the mid-90s VR craze. In 1995 many analysts – serious people – predicted that in 10 years most computers would be shipped with VR headsets or other VR equipment. OK that didn’t happen in 2005 and even 5 more years later in 2010 VR equipment is still rather regarded as rather obscure. So let’s take a look what went wrong with our future visions from the 90s.

Ubiquitous Computing With A Headset – It Takes Two To Tango

Click here to view the embedded video.

10. Your own eyes never get out of fashion.

Sounds stupid but it’s basically one of the main flaws of VR. While no one can seriously argument against 5 minutes of VR fun at the arcade, it is rather unlikely you can convince someone to wear VR headsets for hours during his daily work. Especially in the medical field where many people had high hopes on a VR revolution – surgeons seeing the flesh half transparent with bones and arteries highlighted in their VR headsets – it simply didn’t happen. While there are other technical reasons for these difficulties, we simply forget that surgeons worked well for centuries without reasons to distrust their own eyes.

VR Medicine Meets Gaming

Click here to view the embedded video.

9. Tech doesn’t necessarily improve.

Well when some of us joined the VR hype in the mid 90s we bought equipment at ridiculous high prices, we spent a thousand bucks on a VR headset that has a resolution of 263 x 240 or close to that. While High end devices with rather impressive resolutions like 1024 x 768 were available they were ridiculously expensive, 5000 USD would have been a bargain. We thought like “in 5 years you’ll get them for 99.95 at the discount outlet”, but now about 15 years later this still didn’t happen. Now in 2010 the only halfway serious consumer headsets are the current iglasses and e-magin models, both around 1000 USD and only offering 800 x 600 resolution. Here we have an obvious exception to Moore’s Law.

Click here to view the embedded video.

8. Cyber Sickness

Some people suffer from motion sickness. Some less serious; some already get sick when a car passes by at moderate speed. The same goes for cyber sickness, but what makes cyber-sickness worse is that some people just don’t expect it and act accordingly. Usually if you feel the first symptoms like diziness or your eyes start hurting you should just stop, take off the visor and get a break. Well some people, being unaware of this, ignore the warning signs and literally play until they vomit or at least complain about headache. while no one would refuse to buy a car because they heard you can get motion sick, VR quickly gained this “VR makes you sick myth”, so in some cases one sufferer may have convinced 100 other people that “VR is crap and makes you sick”. Cyber sickness is present but it’s not as bad as some people would have you believe. Basic rule: When you have never been riding a car before don’t drive a full length race of the Indianapolis 500.

Click here to view the embedded video.

7. Too Much snake oil

Actually this could be reason #1 but I keep it at #7 lest the reader think I’m selling it also. Over-promised expectations and under-delivered products (or none at all) were rampant in the mid 90s. While there were fairly nice VR products in “reasonable” price ranges like 2000 USD or below, the hype quickly attracted the purveyors of snake oil. With most VR systems priced out of the home entertainment market, some bright people felt that nature abhors a market vacuum and introduced VR headsets that were both affordable and unwatchable. Among these were big companies like Philips with their infamous “Scuba” headset. Like all of the other fake VR products (Nintendo Virtual Boy?) that put a dent in VR’s image, these usually lacked head tracking, stereoscopy, VGA connector and a tuner – which made these devices quite useless, notwithstanding the terrible image quality. And in the end this is what some people thought VR was – a shitty TV set clamped on your head.

Virtual Reality Hair Replacement

Click here to view the embedded video.

6. Lack of standards

Sounds trivial but this was one of the main problem with VR headsets – there was no standard. In the end m0st manufacturers of consumer VR headsets made them using line interlaced (Field sequential) format – which basically means the first horizontal TV line is the first line on the left screen, 2nd line is the 1st line on right screen, 3rd line is the seond line left and so on. This does not just half the resolution but also some manufacturers simply switched the order of lines for unknown reasons. Some commercial games offered screen modes for these formats as well as some VR related applications. What is even worse is the “quasi standard” of many pro VR headsets which offered separate A/V or VGA in for each single eye. While on first glance this seems to be a great solution – full resolution signal for each eye – it proved to be a real terrible solution as no consumer PC or VCR came with 2 graphics cards and even if you bought an additional card you would most probably not be able to use it as the operating system and application and games simply didn’t support it – other than the Virtuality 1000/2000/3000 series arcade machines and some other professional setups.

The Promise of Standards – ISA Bus Forever!

Click here to view the embedded video.

5. Lack of professional applications

Most technologies that reach the consumer market have derived from “pro” applications and as the devices become more affordable they fall into the consumer market segment. With VR this was somehow twisted upside down – at first there were arcade games and then some people tried to think of some neat uses for industry and business. This didn’t work out well. Some VR gurus might want to tell you like “Every car is designed in VR, every oil well is drilled with VR and all research on macro molecules relies on VR”. This is only half of the story. Car design is indeed one of the last industries where VR is used, but it plays a minor role, mainly used for pre-production studies of design reception; it rather plays a niche role and while it might have been helpful here or there I think it’s safe to claim that car design became neither better nor worse with help of VR. Same applies for oil rigs – while it might, under special circumstances, be helpful to check the planned drill deployment in VR to get a faster impression where obstacles might get in the way, VR certainly did not revolutionize oil drilling nor does it play an important role. And maybe some wonders of chemistry have only been understood as scientists could watch up close, the insides of macro molecules dancing – or maybe not. Other than these examples there are very few professional applications; VR never really got beyond the point of being gimmickery.

Click here to view the embedded video.

4. Lack of OS support

OK VR headsets definitely lack support of Operating Systems. No i don’t mean that VR failed because there is no Mac OS X driver for Forte VFX-1 – actually you can use VR headsets with many Operating Systems – the problem here is just that they are used as a screen replacement not really as a device. As stated already in point #7 we know VR headsets were never invented as a simple screen replacement that is meant to be glued to your forehead – the whole “gag” of the technology is stereoscopy. Seeing your Windows desktop in a headset is neat – but as the saying goes “The goggles – they do nothing”. What would really have helped to develop VR was a VR desktop. If you ask me, it would not have cost much to make Windows 95 include headset support – a 360 degree desktop manager that supports head tracking and stereoscopic window handling – imagine you could zoom your windows back into the space and back to you with your mouse wheel. Keep your browsers to your front, the downloads on your right side and that annoying IM window with your mother-in-law behind you. I know there would not have been many people really making use of this, but it would have been the base VR could have grown on. We somehow missed building that base.

Virtual Desktop

Click here to view the embedded video.

3. No Big Players

VR always lacked support of the big players. And if the big players came up with something it was either never released or turned out to be just a crappy TV Set without head tracking, without stereoscopy, without VGA input – and thus totally useless. Big Companies like Sony always wondered why their cool video glasses like glasstron never sold well. Seriously – who buys video glasses? People who lack a TV? Besides not being very comfortable nor practical they also were very expensive. Who buys these? Judging from advertisements only rich business men who watch movies (Porn??) on airplanes. And the fatal flaw in 1995 – there were barely any portable media players of real usability, and even if these devices came with a built in TV tuner, there is no reception 30,000 feet. Most people I know who had such Video glasses bought them because they like gimmicks, planned to use them “on the go”, did that 3 times and left them rotting in some cupboard. 15 years later, they’re on Ebay! If these companies had made some usable “real” VR headsets, VR would have had much less of this “useless gimmick” appeal.

Some Big Players

Click here to view the embedded video.

2. Prices

Coming in at number two: VR headset manufacturers were quite aware that they were in a “niche” market. There was not much competition, no cheap competitors from far east and simply no one offering an awesome deal. That’s why most companies simply set price points that were way too high. They made mad money during the VR craze – and fell like a lead balloon when it was over. High margins per unit, low penetration… the market never took hold.

Virtual, Virtual Reality (Cool Star-Wars Style Titles Only)

Click here to view the embedded video.

1. Games games games

The worst flaw of the VR hype was that it was unable to produce an adequate number of games or a universal interface to work with games. Today you can play actually most games in stereoscopic 3D with a specific NVidia stereo driver and the appropriate graphics card and the right headset, but to be honest it’s a bit too late. Back in the days – mid 90s when it mattered – there was no standard and every headset had a handful of games supporting it and that’s it. Besides one or two forgotten obscurities there was never a “leading” VR game, some blockbuster that was based that much on VR that it actually made sense AND was fun to play with VR. Nearly all commercial games had VR support “added on top after development as a gimmick” which was neat, but it was clear that manufacturers never really made use of the possibilities VR gave. For some games the added VR support was a “gift from heaven” like for Eurofighter 2000 – a flight simulator that really made you feel like you sit in the cockpit – but for many others it either lacked key features like head tracking or simply didn’t feel like VR was useful. Games have been the key influence of PC development since the 90s. For example Microsoft’s Windows Vista was not as widespread as Microsoft intended to be – no one originally liked or wanted it. When Microsoft bribed the first game manufacturers to make their games only work on Vista, sales finally started going. If VR was a killer argument for gaming then most gamers would buy a headset.

The State of the Art in VR Game Technology

Click here to view the embedded video.

Virtual Boy – Another Perspective…

fronzel — Wed, 14 Apr 2010 20:00:25 +0000

I don’t really agree with the Virtual Boy being VR’s “nail in the coffin”. I think it was just one of many crappy products. Maybe it could have saved the VR hype for a while if it was a big success, but as it is it’s just one of the many VR obscurities that simply didn’t sell.

It Came From the Third Dimension!

Click here to view the embedded video.

Actually when you look back over a 15 year distance it is quite irritating that it was such a failure – after all Nintendo always had big successes with technically disappointing hardware – after the SNES, Nintendo constantly produced low tech consoles – not crap but low tech. With Super Nintendo they were technically “on par” (or at least close) with SEGA’s Genesis. With the original Game Boy they started the actual “wonder” – offering the console with the least attractive hardware at the best price and selling millions of them as the games are simply fun. This worked well with the game boy – although even for 1989 the tech was devastatingly poor, it sold like sliced bread. SEGA released the Game Gear one year later which had a much higher resolution full color screen, faster processor and better sound (If you can call the game boy’s beeping even sound) and sold worse. They pulled the same over and over with later consoles, I don’t even wanna go into detail.

Gaming In The Clinton Years

Click here to view the embedded video.

But back to the Virtual Boy – why didn’t the low tech trick work here? If you take a closer look at the Virtual boy and play a few of the games it suddenly becomes quite clear.

The Virtual Boy was originally planned as a funky VR headset alike console. I think it originally even included a headtracker and a better display. What happened then will never be fully known. My guess is that some management guy looked at the cost and was like “OMG, thats like 10 times what we wanted to spend, cut this, cut that and take this cheap crap”. The original Virtual Boy design planned to use color screens, prolly the same displays as they were common in all low tech consumer VR helmets. Nintendo claimed that the color LCD caused users to see double – if you ever used a stereoscopic HMD you know that this is pretty much bullshit; who claims: “it has to be black and white or you see double?” Actually Black and Red in the case of the virtual boy. Fact is: back in the day, red LEDs were the cheapest available, so my guess is that Nintendo simply wanted it “cheap” as usual.

The display itself – I haven’t even mentioned the display, but maybe its wrong to speak of a display at all. What would surprise most people is that although the Virtual boy is technically rather disappointing, the “display” is a remarkable piece of tech. No, not regarding resolution or picture quality – I am not a big fan of Black/Red 384 x 224 pixel displays, but if you ever opened up one you’d be like “WTF????”. Where you’d expect the display to be, you’d only find one line of exactly 224 tiny red LED’s – and a mirror. The trick here is that the mirror rotates very fast and thus projects the light from the LED into the eye – 50 revolutions per second resulting in a 50 Hz Black&Red display. Although the “display” is nothing you’d like to watch a movie on it is still a remarkable piece of tech, low tech that surprises – i thought only the Russians were known for that.

A Half-Breed Headset (Part 1)

Click here to view the embedded video.

Another flaw was that it was originally planned as a headset – Nintendo obviously saw or played some VR arcade games and was like “w00t, the kids will love this”. In later development two things became obvious – the device was extremely heavy (It used 6 AA cells and the hardware was in the front, making it extremely heavy on the nose. The experience is comparable to the notorious Cybermaxx HMD – if you ever played a Cybermaxx you’ll know that users complained about their nose hurting after an hour of use, mine did hurt for a half day afterwards; I was already worried about permanent nasal damage… Kids and testers using the device concocted ridiculous ideas like playing it on the go or even while riding a bike which led to several small accidents; everyone knew game boy and expected Virtual Boy to be a “portable” device for sure, just from the name. After all the tripod stand looks ridiculous and people often laughed at it, but I bet none of them tried to wear this on their nose for an hour.

So we got a crappy hardware and Nintendo – so why didn’t it lead to success? If you know the secret of Nintendo’s success it becomes quite obvious – the games. Game Boy became a hit mainly because it was affordable, cheap, very portable, batteries lasted quite long and it included easy fun games that were easy to understand. I think the main problem was that the typical Game Boy customer really knew the rough specs of the device and thus did not expect a full color 3D shooter with digitized speech and rendered cutscenes.

But Virtual Boy expectations were different. The name, design and advertisement promised it – a Virtual reality console. Wow! We knew Virtual Reality from stunning multiplayer 360 degree virtual worlds, for example the first Virtuality Cs-1000 arcade machines first offered in 1991. Four years later we saw ridiculously expensive but impressive Home VR devices, most far over $1,000 – and now Nintendo brought out a VR headset for 150 bucks? They are known for their fun games, so lets get one.

People knew that the monochrome graphics would not be too stunning, but of course everyone had some ideas about Virtual Reality – and that was the worst flaw: Everyone was disappointed.

A Half-Breed (Part 2)

Click here to view the embedded video.

While Nintendo demonstrated that they understood what stereoscopy is and how to properly produce 3D effects they failed to make proper use of it. It simply isn’t enough to take a tennis title and be like “Okay lets take an old game boy tennis title, make the front character pop out a bit and end of story.”. Other than”Red Alarm”, all titles rather appeared to be 2D Games modded by amateurs to have basic 3D effects. Titles themselves are also a big reason for the consoles failure – Nintendo released the console in North America with a whopping 4 (FOUR) released games. Of these “Mario Tennis” and “Galactic pinball” were both “unnecessary” titles. Mario Tennis was a rather average tennis game with extremely simple graphics. It was one of those games you’d really just play 1 or 2 times because of the funny stereoscopic effect, but as soon as that wears off you realize how terribly boring it is. Galactic Pinball: If you love pinball you can get some fun out of it although it is quite simple, the stereoscopic effect is weak, just unnecessary gimmickry which wears off fast. Telero Boxer – one of the more innovative titles with 3D effects and 1st person boxing, is fun in the beginning, but the game is ultra repetitive, it’s a pain to play it again once you knocked down 2 dozens of opponents. As already mentioned – Red Alarm was a rather promising title, not being my kind of game, but as a “Spaceship flies through obstacle course and shoots” kind of game it seemed to be the only one that sort of made use of Virtual Boy’s stereoscopic capabilities.

When Nintendo officially buried the Virtual Boy there were just 14 games on the North American market. If you also observed the Japanese market you could perceive the reason for its failure. It’s called “Insmouse no Yakata” and it is the only attempt to make a 3D shooter on the Virtual Boy; I instantly thought they ported Maze wars from 1974. The hardware was simply not sufficient to even make a simple 3D game.

In the end the hardware was just a crappy stereoscopic gameboy. If it had been at least halfway portable and didn’t eat batteries like a monkey eats bananas it might have stood a chance. But for a console you only play at home you for sure did not want a monoscopic, single player machine with a handfull of available games.

Pete’s Virtual Boy Game Collection

Click here to view the embedded video.

In the end it just goes to tell people “You get what you pay for”. People expected a Virtual Reality wonder and just got a 180 Dollar Gimmick without much real entertainment value. Why Nintendo released it is beyong my understanding – the ridiculous low number of titles and ridiculous short time on market underline that Nintendo didn’t really believe in it as well – from the beginning. My guess is that some of the higher manager was like “OMG, VR hype!!!! Lets just see how it develops, maybe it becomes a surprise hit.” Needless to say it didn’t.

What is really the worst part in the story here is the sad role of Gunpei Yokoi. While he was the key figure in Nintendo’s whole success even before they got involved in Video games, he also was the producer/supervisor of many famous Nintendo titles that made the company write one success story after another. Donkey Kong, Mario Bros, Ice Climber and Metroid are just a few of the many beloved bestsellers Yokoi designed. The characters he invented like Mario and Luigi are still what most people identify Nintendo with and a commercial super success.

Among his many brilliant creations is also the Game Boy, which was sold far over 100 million times world wide.

But being grateful is not Nintendo’s strongest ability. Despite his merits, despite the remarkable effort to turn a color VR headset for 1000 Dollars into a 150 Dollar product and despite Nintendos failure to properly develop games for the system all blame was finally put on Yokoi. Nintendo had not been used to failure and it was probably over-reacted, but they finally asked the man who “built” Nintendo, the root of all success to resign. Around a year later Gunpei Yokoi got run over by a truck, he died on the scene.

PT-01 – A Rare Breed Gains Five Stars (If You Keep It On the Shelf!)

fronzel — Tue, 13 Apr 2010 18:36:50 +0000

Ah well, a review of the PT-01 from Optics 1 … Back in the days it was ridiculous expensive, like most of the VR stuff. The pros are that it is very light and optimized for mobile use, i love that it comes with a belt clip and can be driven by a common battery. The cons are that it uses quite cheap plastic and that the case is just “stick together” and it will easily fall apart. Why they didn’t even use a screw or so to fix it properly together is beyond my understanding.

Another flaw is quite obvious – the sunshield which was obviously invented AFTER they started production as it looks like they cut off the visor of a baseball cap and clipped it to the device. They quite obviously realized that it’s not very immersive as they originally planned it. The sunshield is made of fabric and never stays in shape, it looks a bit like something you’d make yourself, not like it belongs to the device. Another terrible drawback is that it only accepts an A/V input. Yeah sure, it matches the device – no headtracker, no VGA input – a portable personal TV screen, w00t! I mean back in the days of VR who bought such stuff? People who were like “i wanna use it to watch TV” or Computer geeks like us? As a VR helmet it fails and for a TV replacement on the go its also not that handy as it lacks a receiver and see-through feature, so you definitely would not use it unless seated. No wonder it’s so rare, i couldn’t imagine anyone who’d really need or want it. More of a collectors piece. Also there was a stereoscopic version which had 2 AV input boxes. I must admit although i have seen this on several devices i never got how you use it “on the go”. Did they expect one to have 2 synchronized VCR on your belt? I always wondered why home devices came like this as i never found a way to get any use of having 2 AV signals.

PT-01_Manual

OK so far for the PT-01. Collectors Value: 5 stars (For the rarity, brand and original price tag), usability 1 Star (add a second star if you dont have a TV set and intend to only watch videos on it anyways).

Number 5 in PC World’s “Ugliest Products in Tech History” – VIRTUAL BOY

Tone — Mon, 29 Mar 2010 20:50:59 +0000

Nintendo’s 1995 Virtual Boy was a whole cartridge based game system inside a desktop-mounted-head stereoscopic immersive display. Designed by Gunpei Yokoi of Gameboy fame, and offered for $180 retail, the market was less than kind. It was withdrawn from the market in less than a year and now can still be found late in the day at weekend garage sales.

The actual displays were unique, a rapidly vibrating linear array of 224 red leds. The array was vibrated at 55 hz, sweeping out a dim red raster. The concept was borrowed from Reflection Technology which had introduced a monocular augmented reality head mounted display in 1990.

Needless to say, Nintendo dumped Yokoi despite his success with Gameboy, and he died in a car wreck a year later. In many ways the Virtual Boy also put the final nail into the 90′s VR craze.

Apropos of the Virtual Boy, the following G4 critique features dominant raster lines, but sadly not Olivia Munn.

Click here to view the embedded video.

AT&T Shows Us Somebody Else’s Future

Tone — Sun, 14 Mar 2010 22:14:53 +0000

This final segment from AT&T’s 1993 Vision of the Future isn’t too far from what’s happenin’ here in 2010, but 17 years later, AT&T is still not a player.

Part1 and Part2 are almost as much fun.

Jaron Lanier Explains Why There’s Still Not A VR Bubble

Tone — Sun, 14 Mar 2010 21:58:30 +0000

Jaron walks us through all eleven reasons, from Gates Envy to Movie Projectors. Strangely enough I agree! The Top Eleven Reasons VR Has Not Yet Become Commonplace Related posts:What to do with the Cable? – Dynamic Visions Myron Kruger Takes a Spin in the Flight Helmet Tearing Out the Guts of a Virtual Research VR-4 [...] Related posts:

So Serious – 1980′s Virtual Reality from NASA

Tone — Sat, 13 Mar 2010 19:09:03 +0000

Related posts:CAVE® – A Virtual Reality Theater – 1993 10 Reasons Why Virtual Reality Did Not Become a Standard Nothing New Under the Sun! Related posts:

CAVE® – A Virtual Reality Theater – 1993

Tone — Sat, 13 Mar 2010 18:08:29 +0000

In 1991, EVL produced its first CAVE® (CAVE Automatic Virtual Environment) prototype, a two screen stereo projection system with single-user tracking and navigation. In late 1991 – early 1992, a 4 screen (3 walls/floor) CAVE® system – now including surround-sound – was completed and premiered at the annual SIGGRAPH Conference. This video provides an overview of the CAVE system/technology and a glimpse of some of the applications being developed at the time which cover a broad range of scientific and academic disciplines.

Click here to view the embedded video.

1995 Virtual IO I-Glasses

Tone — Mon, 08 Mar 2010 08:40:39 +0000

1995 Video of Virtual io’s I-Glasses. Virtual reality Head Mounted Display with headtracking. This was the first i-glasses version released and had much lower resolution than the i-glasses they sell today. Back in 1995 this was one of the first affordable home VR headsets along with the Victormaxx cybermaxx and the fortevr VFX-1. The small and lightweight design made it comfortable to wear, but the enormous cable from the VGA-box to the Computer, the box itself, the cable to the glasses and the power supply rendered it a too large package to really “take everywhere”.

Click here to view the embedded video.

They still work fine today, but the maximum input resolution of 640×480 makes a modern Windows Vista Desktop appear a bit crowded. For today’s standards the resolution and color depth are a bit too low to really enjoy watching 3D movies, but astonishingly the recent “Avatar” game by james Cameron works amazingly well and the nice graphics don’t look as bad as you might think on the low res.

Tearing Out the Guts of a Virtual Research VR-4 Helmet

Tone — Thu, 04 Mar 2010 23:07:59 +0000

Last week I shredded a Liquid Image MRG2.2. This week we go for the classic Virtual Research VR-4 stereoscopic head mounted display. There’s a lot to love about the VR-4: wide field of view optics, adjustable interpupilary distance, coated aspheric lenses, excellent fit to different heads, and provision for eyeglasses. The optics are timeless; used again in the V6, V8, and 15 years later in today’s Virtual Research VR-1280.

All these HMDs rely on 1.3″ displays… so the challenge is out: to find improved LCDs to drop into the classic VR-4, although the resolution of the original displays isn’t half bad.

So… in two parts… have a look inside the VR-4.

Click here to view the embedded video.

and

Click here to view the embedded video.

Liquid Image MRG2.2 Disassembly and Potential Upgrades

Tone — Sun, 21 Feb 2010 22:22:02 +0000

I’ve gotten a ton of emails hurled at me about the Liquid Image MRG2.2 VR helmet. The gist of most of them is: “Hey, I love the wide field of view and how rugged the MRG2.2 is, but I wish I could upgrade the LCD resolution, and, is there a way to make this HMD stereoscopic?”

It’s time to hurl the challenge back at you. These two videos explain in detail how to tear down an MRG2.2, what each of the components are, how they interconnect, and suggestions for how this puppy could be upgraded. If that’s not enough, head over to the V-Rtifacts store for a FREE download of all the technical info on the Sharp LCD, backlight, and all the MRG2.2 cable and connector pin outs.

There ain’t no doubt that the LCD resolution can be upgraded, but the challenge is to see who can do it the most cost effectively. Stereoscopic viewing? The video suggests some possible approaches, but they’re untried as far as I know.

Part 1

Click here to view the embedded video.

Part 2

Click here to view the embedded video.

Typical desktop magnifier, similar to what's used in the MRG2.2

As you might have already guessed, my attorneys from Itchy & Twitchy, Esq. want you to know that disassembling and modifying electronics and power supplies can be dangerous and even life threatening. Don’t mess with this stuff if you don’t know what you’re doing. Thanks to Itchy and Twitchy, you really shouldn’t mess with this stuff, even if you do know what you’re doing. If you zap yourself, it’s not my fault; you were warned. And… don’t rub that thing, you could go blind!