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
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
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.
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.
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.
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!
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.
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.
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.
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)
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
