Head Mounted Displays
Is VR the New Wasteland? (from 1993….)
VR today is like early TV: it suffers from the split personality of most start-up high-tech industries. At the one end is the top of the line research, carried out by institutions with no mandate to sell anything. At the other end, we have new...
LEEP On The Cheap
Build your own LEEP style wide field of view head mounted display optics. Check out the instruction video and parts list below. In the late 80's and early 90's wide field of view head mounted displays were all the rage; immersion was...
The City and the Stars – VR a Billion Years From Now!
Back when VR really had some cred, the Diaspar Virtual Reality Network hopped on the bandwagon. Imagine, if you will, a dial-up service with a feature list, every item containing the phrase "will be", as in this feature will be available... but...
PT-01 – A Rare Breed Gains Five Stars (If You Keep It On the Shelf!)
Ah well, a review of the PT-01 from Optics 1 ... Back in the days it was ridiculous expensive, like most of the VR stuff. The pros are that it is very light and optimized for mobile use, i love that it comes with a belt clip and can be driven...
So Serious – 1980’s Virtual Reality from NASA
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NAuytnYU6JQ
You Put on Your Helmet One Morning and Find Yourself Transformed Into a Monstrous ******?
Yes, I've heard rumors of bugs (lice) inside VR helmets (untrue!), but researchers in Spain are bloody Kafkaesque, putting virtual cockroaches all over the screens. They "got the bright idea to simulate hoards of cockroaches swarming over...
Build Your Own Fluid-based Prismatic Stereoscopic Goggles
For 150 years people have been free-viewing stereoscopic photos (and more recently videos) in a side by side cross-eyed format, where the left view is positioned to the right of the right view. You’re force to cross your eyes like an optical...
10 Reasons Why Virtual Reality Did Not Become a Standard
So well you probably know that it is not a standard that new computers get shipped with VR headsets, although you might have believed that during the mid-90s VR craze. In 1995 many analysts - serious people - predicted that in 10 years most computers would...
Number 5 in PC World’s “Ugliest Products in Tech History” – VIRTUAL BOY
Nintendo's 1995 Virtual Boy was a whole cartridge based game system inside a desktop-mounted-head stereoscopic immersive display. Designed by Gunpei Yokoi of Gameboy fame, and offered for $180 retail, the market was less than kind. It was withdrawn from...
CAVE® – A Virtual Reality Theater – 1993
In 1991, EVL produced its first CAVE® (CAVE Automatic Virtual Environment) prototype, a two screen stereo projection system with single-user tracking and navigation. In late 1991 - early 1992, a 4 screen (3 walls/floor) CAVE® system - now...
W Industries – In the Beginning…
Chris Hand from Leicester Polytechnic offers a delightful history of W Industries, the company who brought us the various Virtuality VR game systems. His history begins in the early 80's and takes us only to early October of 1991, not long...
Back In The USSR
USA and other western world faced consumer-focused Virtual Reality boom in late 80s and early 90s, accurately when USSR is fall apart. VR came to big industrial cities of post USSR later in 1995 – 1998, when VR hype slowly begin to fall down in...
Virtual Boy – Another Perspective…
I don't really agree with the Virtual Boy being VR's "nail in the coffin". I think it was just one of many crappy products. Maybe it could have saved the VR hype for a while if it was a big success, but as it is it's just one of the many VR obscurities...
Jaron Lanier Explains Why There’s Still Not A VR Bubble
Jaron walks us through all eleven reasons, from Gates Envy to Movie Projectors. Strangely enough I agree! The Top Eleven Reasons VR Has Not Yet Become Commonplace
1995 Virtual IO I-Glasses
1995 Video of Virtual io's I-Glasses. Virtual reality Head Mounted Display with headtracking. This was the first i-glasses version released and had much lower resolution than the i-glasses they sell today. Back in 1995 this was one of the first...