With GDC finishing up this week, I’m sure we can all agree that out of all the games, hardware and people, the only thing people seem to be talking about is Virtual Reality (VR). And with good reason. VR is being hailed as the next revolutionary wave of tech that will change how we interact with not only media, but people too. Although it’s topped the news feeds this week, VR isn’t new. By any means actually.
The Beginning
Did you ever own one of these? Cause I sure did. As a child it gave me the ability to briefly travel to Paris and see the Eiffel Tower, or to see a “real” Tyrannosaurus Rex chomping at its prey. This little plastic contraption with weird round photo discs gave you the sense that you were experiencing something or somewhere else without actually being there. Even today’s VR, that’s still the common goal. Yet in 1939, Sawyer’s, Inc. released the View-Master at the New York World’s Fair, way before digital VR…well digital anything really, existed. This was the start of a long, very bumpy road to today’s VR.
The View-Master was a massive success. Hell, even Google and Mattel have reached an agreement to re-release a revamped version of the View-Master based on the Google Cardboard Project, which will be available this October. But it wasn’t until the 1950’s that computers starting playing a part in the VR’s evolutionary journey.
A young engineer by the name of Douglas Engelbart, was a nerd. A super nerd even. But that super nerd is one of the reasons you’re seeing magical images on your computer monitor right now. In the 50’s computers were simply seen as massive, multi-million dollar calculators; useful only to the elitist of super nerds. Mr. Engelbart thought differently. As a former naval radar technician, he believed these calculators would be more useful with a digital display. I think he was right. It wasn’t until the 60’s that super nerds world wide would finally agree with Mr. Engelbart. His digital imaging dream laid the groundwork for VR screens today.
The Middle
Fast forward a few decades, and we’ve reached the crazy eighties. By this point video games have already started to gain in popularity with the Atari and Commadore64 providing a decent library of entertainment. However the big year was 1985. Nintendo, a company originally founded in 1889 (seriously, Nintendo was originally a Japanese card company, formally known as Nintendo Koppai), released the, still to this day, most influential piece of hardware known to the gaming world; The Nintendo Entertainment System (NES). Although the NES, and it’s successor, the Super NES, were key in defining what video games are today, it was not all fuzzy bunnies and gold bricks.
On November 14, 1994, Nintendo announced the future of gaming, or so everyone thought. The Virtual Boy was the first time consumers had the opportunity to own a piece of the future. To be fully immersed in a digital world was what most early gamers dreamed about. The Virtual Boy hit the North American masses on August 14, 1995 for $180 ($260 today if you account for inflation). It sucked. I owned one. We gamers were now accustomed to state-of-art, 16-bit color graphics, with stories that were engaging and memorable. The Virtual Boy brought a monochrome display with two colors; Red and Black (actually only one if you’re one of those that doesn’t consider black a color…racist I tell you). There were only 4 games available in North America at launch:
- Galactic Pinball
- Mario’s Tennis
- Red Alarm
- Teleroboxer
The Virtual Boy was a commercial flop. Nintendo said that adding color screens would have put the product at an unacceptable price point to most consumers, and that motion tracking would cause motion sickness. So the extremely heavy headset came with a stand and had to stay stationary at all times. Only a total of 14 games made it stateside before the Virtual Boy was ultimately discontinued less than a year later on March 2, 1996.
The Virtual Boy may not have been a success commercially, but it was never forgotten. It was a terrible tease to what the future would be like. Since then, we have been begging for technology to advance to the point where VR actually be entertaining. Luckily for our generation, it seems that time has finally come.
The Unknown
It was the year 2012. Some 20 year old dude named Palmer Luckey caught the attention of famed programmer and founder of ID Software (famous for the original Wolfenstein and Doom games), Mr. John Carmack. Carmack was researching the idea of advanced head mounted displays for use in the gaming community. Palmer Luckey was in the middle of actually developing and prototyping a new head mounted display for exactly that; gaming. He called this display the Oculus Rift. Shortly before E3 2012, Carmack announced a future updated version of Doom 3 would be available on the Oculus Rift.
The Oculus Rift garnered massive attention after destroying it’s fundraising goal on Kickstarter. Their original goal was $250,000. They ended up raising a whopping $2,437,429. This was a clear sign the public was still desperately wanting a true VR experience. This wasn’t the end of Oculus’s financial success. Through a combination of cash and stocks, Facebook purchased Oculus for two billion dollars on March 25, 2014.
Since the introduction of the Oculus Rift, Sony announced it’s own VR head mounted display for the Playstation 4; Project Morpheus. Valve recently announced a partnership with HTC, who together will release the HTC Vive VR headset. Microsoft also jumped on the interactive headset bandwagon and introduced the Microsoft Hololens. The Hololens however is more along the lines of Augmented Reality; having digital media visually integrated with your real-view surroundings. Though Microsoft has said that gaming is a huge opportunity for the Hololens ^.
It’s a fact that competition encourages advances and development. Seeing so many big names joining the VR race is a good sign of things to come. Today, I think we can safely assume that this time around, VR is not simply a fad. In terms of the current state of technology, we might not be able to immerse ourselves in a virtual world that’s indistinguishable from the real one, but we’re not that far off either. When that will happen is anyone’s guess as there is less than a handful of VR-like headsets currently available to consumers (Samsung’s GearVR for example). When will we know that VR is hear to stay? My guess is when either you can virtually shake hands with greats like Nathan Drake and Kratos and your mind thinks you’re actually touching them, or VR porn. Beam me up Scotty! (RIP Mr. Nemoy)
**What do you think of the future of VR? Sound off in the comments below, or you can reach me on all major social networks:
Twitter: @23_jshep, @sweatyTHUMBstix
Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/sweatyTHUMBstix
Stay Sweaty.
–Justin Shep
SweatyTHUMBstix - Gaming and Tech News, Reviews and Discussions 