Found a pretty neat video on how Virtual Reality was perceived back then.
[media]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c5ZnWNilMxw&feature=player_embedded[/media]
well they're not wrong
[editline]28th October 2014[/editline]
man I wonder how hilarious today's live-renders will look in 20 years
I find it funny that at the time this was shot Palmer Luckey had 1 year to be born.
Reminds me of "The Lawnmower Man."
when i was twelve i got a virtual reality thing for christmas, expecting something like this. instead all i got was a fucking tiger electronics game built into a helmet.
It seems that Occulus wasn't the first one to put googly eyes on their gadget
[IMG]http://game-focus.com/images/screenshots/O/oculus-rift/team-forteress-Oculus.jpg[/IMG]
[IMG]http://i.imgur.com/c1hLnC5.gif[/IMG]
Hey that FPS game they were playing was referenced in Freakzoid!
[media]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AD9_5ZuvzoY[/media]
The name of the ep was Virtual Freak if any one wants to watch the whole thing.
[QUOTE=Xerios3;46358855]It seems that Occulus wasn't the first one to put googly eyes on their gadget
[IMG]http://game-focus.com/images/screenshots/O/oculus-rift/team-forteress-Oculus.jpg[/IMG] [/QUOTE]
[IMG]http://i.imgur.com/N62hUoR.png[/IMG]
[QUOTE=Magman77;46357369]well they're not wrong
[editline]28th October 2014[/editline]
man I wonder how hilarious today's live-renders will look in 20 years[/QUOTE]
"Simulations so realistic that the line is being blurred"
I wonder where did all of this went for 20 years? What we see on the video is really great, I expected it to be much worse. Why didn't it develop further? We could have had an oculus rift in 2000 at that rate.
Well damn, they had motion tracking at that time?
It seems like the biggest things that improved are graphics and cost.
[QUOTE=Snickerdoodle;46359403]Well damn, they had motion tracking at that time?
It seems like the biggest things that improved are graphics and cost.[/QUOTE]
The latency was absurd back in the day.
It makes me sad to think that if I was born later I would be able to experience realistic virtual reality.
[QUOTE=Spor;46359302]I wonder where did all of this went for 20 years? What we see on the video is really great, I expected it to be much worse. Why didn't it develop further? We could have had an oculus rift in 2000 at that rate.[/QUOTE]
In 1991 [url=http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IrisVision]we had just designed the first 3D accelerator board for the PC[/url] and it was still lightyears behind what a RISC workstation costing tens of thousands of dollars could do. DirectX didn't exist yet. OpenGL didn't exist yet. The average person still ran Windows at 640x480. Windows 3.1 wasn't even in stores yet. Literally for twenty years VR was a hype train.
Right through the 90's and into the early 00's PC's were still not powerful enough to deliver on the promise of virtual reality so all real attempts to develop VR were incredibly expensive. Even the arcade experiences were costing up to $10 a game. Once the era of the workstation same to an end and the PC market came in to fill the void there was now a large enough platform to develop on that was standardized and affordable but LCD resolutions were still quite poor. Finally about five or six years ago that all changed and VR development started taking off. The Oculus Rift has been the first attempt to push VR since the [url=https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J0n5B3fl-bU]Forte VFX1[/url] back in the late 90's and from what we've seen so far it's good. Really good.
What this article mostly demonstrates to me is the way media tends to report on scientific or technological innovations and advances. Without understanding or communicating the limitations or even the reality of the subject matter, wild assumptions and speculations are being brought up that lead to the viewer completely overestimating the pace and practical application of advancing technology. They are almost directly suggesting that a mind reading wonder device will conjure up a dream world for you to become completely immersed in, when in reality its just a pair of stereoscopic goggles and an awkward control device to perform basic manipulation of rudimentary, early polygon graphics that the available technology can barely support in real time.
It's a subject I've recently become interested and its everywhere, even in the supposedly more respectable scientific world. There's this ongoing notion that we are moving towards great scientific milestones of great potential in engineering and medical fields at lightning speed that is especially enforced by misleading or sensationalist media reports or celebrity scientists like Michio Kaku. This gives some people the mindset that we are capable of great technological leaps within the next century or even our own lifetime, but what it all boils down to is simple marketing that is just as important in scientific fields that are not typically associated with marketing mindsets. It's an interesting subject, if you have the possibility to access academic research material, go and look into some of the actual research papers that are being reported on. It can be pretty sobering to compare what is suggested in media reports to the reality
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