VR TECHNOLOGY has been around since
the ’90s, with the earliest commercial
attempt being Sega’s brief demonstration
at the Consumer Electronics Show in
1993, which was then canned before
release. A few other manufacturers
took a shot, most notably Sony, but the
technology wasn’t quite there yet.
The experience was fraught with latency
issues and tunnel vision, and while it was
a hopeful portent of things to come, most
gamers weren’t exactly blown away.
Fast-forward a couple of decades,
and we find ourselves in the mystical,
futuristic land of 2012. Plucky tech startup
Oculus began a Kickstarter campaign to
crowdfund its advanced, high-end Rift VR
headset, designed by Palmer Luckey, with
the support of id Software co-founder
John Carmack, a big proponent of VR.
The fundraising campaign was massively
successful, raising more than 10 times
the original goal of $250,000. The finished
product was released to consumers
in 2016, and was immediately popular,
although the initial retail price of $599
meant sales were hardly through the roof.
It was a successful innovation, though,
and everyone wanted a slice of the VR pie.
Sony came back with a vengeance, giving
its successful PlayStation 4 console
a VR headset, the inventively named
PlayStation VR. Cell phone manufacturer
HTC partnered with Valve to produce
its own contender, the HTC Vive. The
competition was fierce, although primarily
between HTC and Oculus; Sony’s offering
was console-specific, as opposed to the
PC-oriented applications of the other two.
Surprisingly, Sony came out ahead;
the PSVR was and still is the single most
successful system-tethered VR headset
ever, selling over four million units in
three years, thanks to a lower initial price,
compatibilit y with Sony’s existing P S Move
motion controllers, and an assurance
that the headset would work perfectly
with the static PS4 hardware. Oculusoutsold HTC by a small margin on its first
release units, but both the Rift and Vive
shared the same problem: needing to
work with a wide variety of consumers’
PCs, both pre-built and custom systems.
This is an issue that has plagued the
majority of VR headsets designed to work
with PCs. The uncertainty as to whether
their rig can support a VR platform drives
potential buyers away. With the PSVR,
it was simple: If you have a PS4, you can
use it. With PC-tethered VR headsets,
consumers had to ensure that the systemthey had was capable of running games in
VR—and with a huge variety of custom-
built machines in the homes of PC gamers
across the globe, that became a problem.GOING MOBILE
Of course, the companies behind VR were
aware of this, and working on solutions.
Oculus produced the Oculus Go, a PC-less
offering that went without wires thanks to
an integrated Qualcomm chip to handle
graphics. It wasn’t incredible in terms
of graphical fidelity, but it sold well, even
exceeding Rift sales in some markets.
The more powerful follow-up, the Oculus
Quest, was released recently, and you can
find our review of it in this very issue.
A different strategy was employed by
Samsung, which collaborated with Oculus
to corner a slice of the market with a
super-cheap solution: a VR headset with
a slot for a Samsung Galaxy smartphone,
which acted both as a screen and CPU.
It sort of worked; the GearVR headset
contained its own hardware for motion
controls and head tracking, and at less
than $100, it was far more affordable than
other options, although it did require the
user to own a Galaxy phone.
GearVR sold well, shifting five million
units, and spawned legions of imitators of
varying degrees of quality. Slightly before
its release (but long after Samsung’s
plans for the GearVR were conceived),
Google announced Google Cardboard,
a hilarious but undeniably effective VR
solution that consumers could buy or even
build themselves from cardboard. It used
the same smartphone-oriented ideas
as the GearVR, but was even cheaper and
less sophisticated—because, well, it was
made of cardboard. Google put out its own
proper answer to Samsung’s GearVR,
Google Daydream, a few years later.WHERE NEXT?
While all of these products did well, none
set the world alight. Google DaydreamFrom left to right: Forte’s VFX1 was one of the earliest attempts at VR, using a weird hockey-
puck-shaped controller. The original Oculus Rift was a true game-changer for VR. Samsung
and Oculus worked together to produce GearVR, a cheaper alternative to full VR headsets.Palmer Luckey, the original creator of the
Oculus Rift, has since left the company.©^
FORTE,^
SAMSUNGthe state of VR
48 MAXIMUM PC JAN 2020 maximumpc.com