was discontinued earlier this year, while
GearVR hasn’t had a new hardware
announcement since 2017. PSVR has
remained a constant, a good metric of how
well VR as a whole is performing, although
as the release of the PlayStation 5 looms,
it seems likely that Sony may take a
moment to evaluate the direction it wants
to head regarding VR.
John Carmack himself was recently
decorated at the third annual VR Awards,
receiving a lifetime achievement award
for his work with Oculus. However, during
his acceptance speech, he noted that
he and some of his colleagues “really
haven’t been satisfied with the pace of
progress” with regard to VR development
and expansion. He also admitted that VR
is still an incredibly niche market, and
remarked that there was a lot of work “yet
to be done” before V R could proper ly hit it s
stride. Since then, Carmack announced he
was standing down from Oculus to focus
on artificial intelligence projects instead.
As far as we’re concerned, he’s right;
VR seems to be stagnating. Oculus
released the Rift S in early 2019, and afew months later HTC shot back with its
Vive Cosmos. Both were quality, high-
end headsets, but with more of a focus on
improved hardware specs than genuine
innovation. Improved camera tracking,
higher resolution screens, and so forth;
all good improvements, but useless
without top-notch software to match it.
The biggest change made by the Vive
Cosmos is a reworked headset design that
enables the wearer to raise the “visor”
without removing the whole headset.
Even Oculus, arguably the progenitor
of the modern VR headset, isn’t moving
rapidly. The Quest and Rift S aren’t
rethinkings of VR, just upgrades to existing
tech; like the PSVR and Vive Cosmos,
they’re not pushing the VR industry
forward in a meaningful way, even if they
are great products. The problem with VR’s
failure to expand might lie elsewhere,
then, perhaps more on the software side.BLAME THE GAMES
A common opinion is that VR is lacking
a killer app; that one game or program
that is a genuine game-changer. So far,VIRTUAL
ORIGINS
VR has been kicking about for a while
in various forms. Perhaps the most
memorable precursor to modern VR
was Nintendo’s oft-maligned Virtual
Boy, a table-mounted headset that
demanded you press your eye holes into
it to experience wonky stereoscopic
3D games in all their red-tinted 32-bit
glory. It was frankly horrible, and a huge
commercial failure for Nintendo.
The Virtual Boy (pictured above) might
be a familiar industry touchstone, but it
wasn’t a true VR headset; the focus was
on headache-inducing parallax 3D. Sony’s
Glasstron visor was a true predecessor
of VR as we know it today; a proper head-
mounted display that enabled gamers to
take a seat in the cockpit of a war machine
in MechWarrior 2. Sony released five
models of the Glasstron across three
years in the ’90s, and while they weren’t
a huge success, they would set the stage
for Sony to produce PlayStation VR nearly
20 years later.
Some smaller companies tried to
take a stab at VR before the turn of the
century, too, none leaving much impact.
In Britain, IBM-funded company Virtuality
Group experimented with VR headsets
in arcades, and some have argued that
the arcade is the perfect setting for VR; a
chance to try out games and experiences
in virtual reality, without having to
fork out hundreds of dollars for the
hardware. In fact, modern VR headsets
aren’t an uncommon sight in arcades
today, although the decline of arcades in
general doesn’t bode very well for that
avenue of success.
It’s difficult to chart how exactly the
history of VR led to Palmer Luckey’s
Oculus Rift prototype in 2012. It was a
fresh start; an effort to revive VR with the
new technology of the day. And it worked.
VR was back with a bang, ready to enter
a new golden age, only to grind to a halt
again as the buzz of excitement died
down, and the harsh realities set in.Right: The HTC Vive has remained Oculus’s
main competitor in the VR market.EVE: Valkyrie was one of the first major VR titles, demonstrating the power of the hardware.©^
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