Apple wasn’t the only one with ‘i’ products, and Virtuality Group wasn’t the only one with VR projects in the 90s.
Video games often paint a tainted image in most of our minds. Its evolution from the old gaming arcades to the home consoles or handheld units (call it as you wish), marks the grandness of a virtual escape amidst reality.
With the Oculus Rift making waves in the virtual reality front, the reinforcing odds of a virtual-world fusing with reality seem rewarding. So what next?
The new VR headsets endorsed by Facebook, Sony, Samsung and other key players are certainly not the first of their kind. Perhaps, the market wasn’t prepared to embrace this technology until recently. Blame it on technological limitations, speculations, price tags or all of them. Nonetheless, the resurgent virtual reality front deserves an acknowledgement for depicting a new renaissance to gaming!
A Flashback
It is important to take a glance at some of the iterations of VR in the past. In the early 1990s, Virtuality Group came up with a set of VR systems that brought fervency among the masses. It included a stand-up arena type system and a vehicle cockpit type. We also recall the short-lived ‘Virtual Boy’ of the mid ’90s.
Nintendo released the machine with huge expectations, but the wheels didn’t seem to turn right for them. It included stereoscopic 3D and it came cheaper than many of the other VR options of the time.
Later, the iGlass was introduced and they were capable of offering a VR experience to customers. Apple wasn’t the only one with ‘i’ products, and Virtuality Group wasn’t the only one with VR projects in the 1990s. Several companies worked on similar lines, concepts and excogitations; but nothing stirred up the VR platform.
Plenty of games came close to a full VR experience, but it was the Oculus Rift, which gave the long-formed-notion a defined shape. With support from global giants like Facebook and Sony, the Oculus Rift is certainly poised to make virtual reality big!
VR is the Future
The future beckons of ‘virtual reality’ can be aligned to all kinds of nouns, vowels and consonants. In other words, the applications that VR can support are countless! Our imaginations are redolent with James Bond movies, Kipling balads, comic stories and so on. But somehow, none adds to give a clear picture of what the VR headsets have for us in the near future.
Virtual reality naturally invokes the idea of Matrix-like rendition of the real world; scenes form Star Wars with laser swords, shooting at people without real world consequences, etc. The VR environment may be ‘virtual’ by nature, but it can provide solutions to many real world challenges, which would otherwise require a lump sum amount of money and time.
