Whatever Happened To... Virtual Reality?

I think what happened to it is that people realised it wasn't very good and wasn't likely to be very good for a while and the technology is no doubt still being developed somewhere. Also people realised that outside of maybe the military it wasn't very useful either - 'virtual sex' would invariably involve putting electronic circuitry you didn't want to get wet right next to bits of you that you did; 'virtual meetings' were pointless compared to teleconferencing; the internet came along and revolutionised communications anyway. etc.

In the gaming world it was a casualty of the gradual realisation that realism=boredom when you get beyond a certain level. People are still trying it - at Game On there was a 'demo' of some art project that had tried to create a virtual reality of a 'vibrantly multicultural East End market' which was unspeakably poor.

http://www.immersence.com/osmose.htm and the followup http://www.immersence.com/ephemere.htm

(nice navigational gimmick too but probably won't run on my Celeron...)

i always thought virtual realities should be abstract - if i want to walk around an east london market i'll go to east london. i want acid trips without the acid 8)

the equipment reminds me of bondage gear too. and that may be one reason it didn't catch on - the need to trust everyone around to unstrap you afterwards and not to dick around when you couldn't see them.

that and looking like an idiot swiping at things nobody else can see.

andy

I recall that one Oliver Stone did that Wild Palms miniseries back in 1993 and that VR was a big part of it. Silly boy.

The end is nigh.

I had a college roommate in 1993 who talked incessantly about how "virtual reality" would take over and you would be able to fuck Pam Anderson or Cindy Crawford inside a video game. Estimated time for this? The year 2000.

-- Pleasant Plains /// (pleasant.plain...), April 5th, 2005.

(I bet that he's still waiting.)

LOL watching lawnmower man right now - I MISS JEFF FAHEY

"You Just Haven't Earned It Yet Baby" by The Smiths was on iTunes when I read that and I heard it as "You Just Haven't Earned It Jeff Fahey"

still fucking waiting

http://www.gizmag.com/eyes-on-oculus-rift-virtual-reality-ces/26225/

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pAC5SeNH8jw

http://www.ign.com/articles/2013/07/03/how-oculus-rift-will-change-the-world-beyond-gaming

I do feel like oculus rift has everybody doing the lawnmower man v2.0 shuffle, but I WANT TO BELIEVE

To answer the question in the thread title, Virtual Reality only ever existed within virtual reality.

i dunno why ppl would wear something like that on their face no matter what it was showing you. i'll hold out for google contacts i guess

https://twitter.com/NoodlecakeGames/status/629347202146693120

Always wanted to know what would happen if you mix Google Glass technology with Google Deep Dream

http://shop.mattel.com/product/index.jsp?productId=71529026

Haha

really, how good are these things? heard of this going for £30: http://www.immerseheadset.com/

i'd love to be able to recreate one of these things on one: http://www.lifetools.com/lightandsounddevices/mindlabproteusletter.html basically flashing lights at different speed, but great for relaxing/meditating

I tried a Gear VR last week. It was basically a Samsung phone strapped into some VR goggles. It was really cool. I was in an aquarium with a bunch of fish swimming all around me. At one point I watched a whale dive way down and swim underneath my feet, which was amazing. Later there was a 3D version of Breakout where I aimed with my eyes and tapped the side of the glasses to shoot. It was very cool!

My eyes did start to hurt after a while though, and it drained the battery like crazy, which was fine.

All in all I was really impressed, and it was pretty low budget technology. Can't wait to see what they do in the future.

It was basically a Samsung phone strapped into some VR goggles. It was really cool.

Read that in a sarcastic tone. Proceeded to laugh heartily at the rest of the post.

ok this stuff is really really good. might prove to be a daft gimmick and i get bored of it in a week but doubt it.

spent hours reading up on this and best thing to do is order one of those google v2 cardboard kits (£15) and a velcro headstrap (£3). oh and a decent smartphone, im using my galaxy s5. don't get the plastic headsets, they aren't as good as the cheaper cardboard ones. not tried gear vr or zeiss one but they're supposed be decent, both around £100. but yeah, try out the cardboard kits, costs a pittance and one of the most exciting things i've tried all year. getting a ton of these in for xmas presents.

loads of free apps, some amazing stuff like this vrse thing which puts you in a completely 360 new york street, and this horror game called sisters that i can't get more than halfway through because it shits me up too much.

the NY Times is in

http://www.wired.com/2015/11/google-cardboards-new-york-times-experiment-just-hooked-a-generation-on-vr/

Hell yeah. I was really surprised at how immersive it was.

vr died while inside a vr

(remember vrml? yahoo even had a vrml version at one point. it was just polygons.)

the box sucks btw. NYT app is impressive tho!

https://www.oculus.com/en-us/blog/oculus-rift-pre-orders-to-open-on-jan-6/

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9jx2YWzxvbs

my friend has an htc vive that I tried today, it was super fun. def the future of gaming, I don't even love pc/video games but would absolutely buy one of these if you didn't need a souped up computer system.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fMml5UCd_fQ

jfc clean yr room loser

tried the new VR room that opened recently in Vancouver (Evolve). Free 15 minute trial; the forest meditation was super relaxing and pretty zen. the james bond style game was unreal tho, stuck in front of a window on a high rise in which one needs to break. In front of me was a pistol, window spray and casing device (to cut glass). Definitely dropped the gun many times and to the onlooker probably looked like a tool as I bent over to pick it up. Anyway there is nearly 100 games I think and 2 hours is 25 dollars before 6 PM. Definitely cool

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZhwWoMveqJs

We Met In Virtual Reality

Yet again Ilxor's "two years pass" and "four years pass" etc says as much as the content. The internet has a problem expressing negative space, anti-hype, uninterest, emptiness. It's a white noise blizzard of anti-content. I have a book in my possession called Virtual Worlds, by a chap called Benjamin Woolley. It was published in 1993 - I think it was a tie-in with a BBC TV series, because it rang bells in my mind when I bought it.
https://images-na.ssl-images-amazon.com/images/I/71H97FQ7H5L._SX306_BO1,204,203,200_.gif

I thoroughly recommend it because it digresses all over the place. It has a cynical tone despite coming up just after the VR boom of 1992. The author points out that the technology is clunky and a lot of the people evangelising it at the time had a track record of failure, of lofty ideas, or they were just hypemongers who latched onto the latest trends, viz Timothy Leary.

And as this thread demonstrates the tech industry occasionally tries to push VR, but it never catches on. It was dwarfed by 3DTV, and even that didn't reach critical mass. I've noticed an odd tendency whereby if you criticise e.g. Half-Life: Alyx or VR in general people get angrily defensive, as if you're kicking a puppy. As if they think you're destroying an industry and putting people out of work, and you should agree to keep quiet and not spoil the fun. I would give some examples but I'm literally making it all up.

I mean, my first ever memory of being impressed with a video game was Battlezone in the arcades. I remember playing the stand-up cabinet where you had to look through some goggles. It blew my mind. I wondered if you could drive to the mountains in the background. It felt like the future and made every other game look ridiculous. But even I have never felt a need to stop a helmet to my head while at home. It would just be incredibly impractical. Until we get ports in our necks it's doomed to be a niche. As a niche it will get limited funding. It will never benefit from economies of scale, and so it'll remain a niche.

dumbfounding that they didn’t call the doc We Met In The Metaverse tbh

good call on Battlezone as the first VR experience

The milkman the paperboy
Evening tv

I don't think VR can ever overcome the stumbling block of physical sensation to be truly satisfying. You have a 180 degree viewing field and surround sound in your VR headset, but you're still holding a controller and feeling the air conditioning in your living room instead of the heat of an alien desert planet. Porn can't lead the way as it did with so much other technology because no matter how much you can zoom in, it's still the viewer's hand around the viewer's dick.

Until Quark's holosuites are real, new VR attempts are going to flop every 10 years until we can't spare the electricity to bother.

The milkman the paperboy
Evening tv

Just ctrl-f'd to see if anyone had made that joke yet

Google Glass the flying car
And 3D tv

also VR makes people wanna barf if they play for more than 20 minutes

well, just for the record, I've been having a blast for a long time now with various driving VR games. This is one area I believe that it can work extremely well, with good coding of course, because you're stationary in body and just looking around with your head.

Using a steering wheel too helps with the immersion. I'm totally addicted to trucking sim.

https://www.minecraft.net/en-us/article/minecraft-and-nfts