Virtual Reality

Goldstein

Banned
When I was a child, my father (as a lot of people then) believed that, by the late 00's, most of the videogame industry would be VR based. Obviously, that never happened.

With a post-1990 POD, could that prediction have turned out to be true?
 
maybe arcade would still be particulary sought place since VR ain't really made for home.

Maybe stuff like the matrix come earlier :D
 
I think you need a combination of arcade and home gaming to pull it off. The arcade just to set up the basics of the system, and a set of games avalible for the average person. Home gaming however is what can make this affordable, and take on a mainstream roll.

Let's say Nintendo does it first, but you have these small black and white goggles and a few buttons, and it doesn't work all that well. It however make everything else look out of date.

Sega gets involved next, with its "Game Gear" that feautres an adjustable visor, and two seperate controls for the game. One a traditional joystick, and the other a glove. It is still considered very basic, but its range of games, as well as the interaction makes it outsellf everything else.

The important thing occurs once Nintendo and Sega start fighting over the VR market. As the "cool" games tend to be geared towards VR, and a SNES costs a little less then a VR console parents buy their kids the VR more often then not.

Once Sony gets into the picture everything takes a step up. Better equipment, more pixels, and surprisingly the home market finds a company that makes nothing but VR games. By the time the PS3 rolls around it is almost the norm to see people walk about their house running into things as they fight dragons, and robot assassins.
 
My God, how young are you? :). When I was a kid and talked to my father about future stuff it was more like him saying, "We'll never fly in space because our heads will explode."
 
I think the biggest problem is that people WAY underestimated the computational resources needed.

Realtime VR? we can't do that on a single computer with graphics coprocessors they never dreamed of back then.
 
My God, how young are you? :). When I was a kid and talked to my father about future stuff it was more like him saying, "We'll never fly in space because our heads will explode."
Child when I was young my father said " Hitting a person with a rock won't hurt them":D;)
My mother said "Put down those Walnuts as they are not edible".
I then invented the first combination weapon and eating utensil, " Rock, Handheld, One Each" as it was known to the military .
 
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Goldstein

Banned
My God, how young are you? :). When I was a kid and talked to my father about future stuff it was more like him saying, "We'll never fly in space because our heads will explode."

I'm 20 years old, and it was in 1994 when I heard about VR for the first time.

Fenwick: You're right. Some videogame company developing a practical home gaming system, would have been a reasonable POD, even if is one of the most problematic points of VR.

Dathi Thorffinson: Not neccesarily real time vr, but a way to get a bounding sensorial experience while you play a videogame.

Maybe a good starting point would be a more succesful Virtual Boy, with its clearest flaws somewhat solved.
 
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