And All That Hype, Game Systems, Head Mounted Displays, VR Companies, Where Are They Now?
In 1993, Sega stood in front of the world’s press, showed off a $200 virtual reality headset for the Genesis, and then quietly strangled it in a back room. The official cause of death — and I need you to sit with this — was that it worked too well. The...
And All That Hype, Head Mounted Displays, Position Trackers, VR Companies, Where Are They Now?
Before the future had a price tag, VPL Research printed one anyway: $49,000. That was the EyePhone HRX, the deluxe model. The standard EyePhone was a comparatively thrifty $9,400, and the DataGlove — the one that let you point at things that weren’t...
And All That Hype, Head Mounted Displays, VR Companies, Where Are They Now?
In 1990, NHK’s Today’s Japan aired a dispatch from tomorrow. Tomorrow, it turns out, looked like a man in beige goggles waving a gloved hand at objects only he could see, while a narrator gently explained “artificial reality” to a...
And All That Hype, Around the World
The Fuji W1 already hit shelves in japan last year, but it took a while untill you could see it everywhere else. Now i got my very own one and tested it a bit. OK it is not really directly related to Virtual Reality and also not really an artifact i used my good old...
And All That Hype, VR Companies, VR Publications, Where Are They Now?
1994 marks the peak of what many view as the first “Big Bubble” in VR popularity. There were literally hundreds of (mostly) entrepreneurial startups taking a wild fling and what seemed to be a game-changing technology. You could strike sparks anywhere! By...
Head Mounted Displays, How-To; Teardowns; Tutorials
The Oculus DK2 is a remarkable VR headset, producing a remarkably wide field of view with very inexpensive single element optics. VRtifacts was curious about the characteristics of the Oculus DK2 lens: what size, what material, and what focal length? The lenses...
And All That Hype, Around the World, Head Mounted Displays
Two milkshakes make the whole issue of virtual reality motion sickness moot. There’s not much more commentary to add...
And All That Hype, Cybersex, In the Movies
According to several women writers, a hot hi-tech hiring wave will be seeking: Teledildonics Integration Engineers and API Programmers (FAPs.) While porn has been trying to edge into Virtual Reality Sex, and VR keeps trying to penetrate the porn market, maybe the...
VR Companies, VR Publications, Where Are They Now?
Hot off the press is Ben Delaney’s authoritative new book, Sex, Drugs, and Tessellation which collects 6 years of wisdom from Ben’s CyberEdge Journal, the go-to virtual reality publication from 1991 through 1996. Ben has always been both a...
Head Mounted Displays, VR Companies, VR Now
A lot of people are fuming over today’s announcement that Facebook would be buying Palmer Luckey’s Oculus. Palmer and company produced two mainstream marketed development kit head mounted displays which became darlings of the grassroots VR/Gamer community....
Around the World, Game Systems, Head Mounted Displays, How-To; Teardowns; Tutorials, VR Companies
W-Industries (Virtuality) always seemed to have a PR person riding herd on any video material that was released about the company or products. Everything the public saw was tightly scripted and edited. But… here’s a 1992 video from inside the factory...
And All That Hype, Game Systems, Head Mounted Displays, In the Movies, On TV, VR Companies, Where Are They Now?
ABC Primetime covers the VR scene in Sept. 1991. Although this news report conflates computer animation footage with Virtual Reality, it also features interviews with Jon Waldern, Fred Brooks, Howard Rheingold, Mike McGreevey, and C L Dodgson (virtually, of course.)...
And All That Hype, Cybersex, In the Movies, Stereoscopic 3D
Speechless!!...
And All That Hype
2013 has brought much excitement to the VR world, especially the perception of great breakthroughs in Head Mounted Display products. Can we take a deep breath, then hold up a distant mirror to the cautionary history of VR from 1993-1998. Back then there also was a...
Head Mounted Displays, How-To; Teardowns; Tutorials
Here’s a much more detailed tear down of the Virtual Research VR-4 Head Mounted Display, done by one of the engineers at VR sometime in 1994. He shows us how to remove the back light inverter and the main PCB. ‘Scuse the vintage VHS EP mode recording. I...
