A crowdfunded development kit revives virtual reality

What happened

Virtual reality had failed publicly in the 1990s. Headsets were heavy, screens were coarse, tracking lagged behind head movement enough to make people ill, and the whole category cost far too much to reach anyone outside research labs and arcades. The new prototype attacked those problems with components that the smartphone boom had made cheap: a single high-resolution mobile display, inexpensive motion sensors and simple plastic lenses, combined with software correction for the distortion the lenses introduced. The result was crude to look at and startlingly effective to wear, because the field of view was wide and the head tracking felt roughly immediate.

The pitch was unusual in that it did not promise a finished product. Backers were buying a kit to build software with, and the campaign raised millions on that basis. Endorsements from respected engineers, notably John Carmack, gave the project credibility inside the industry, and thousands of developers received hardware at once, which created a body of experimental software and a shared understanding of what caused discomfort. Latency, frame rate, resolution and tracking accuracy stopped being abstract targets and became specific engineering thresholds that everyone in the field could discuss.

The world at the time

Smartphones had driven the cost of high-resolution displays and motion sensors down by orders of magnitude, and graphics hardware was finally fast enough to render two viewpoints at high frame rates. The industry's memory of 1990s virtual reality was uniformly bad, so no major company was investing. The gap was left open for outsiders with parts catalogs.

What it changed

Facebook acquired the company less than two years later, and large technology firms followed with headset programs of their own. Consumer models reached buyers in 2016, and the vocabulary set by these early kits, presence, room-scale tracking, motion sickness thresholds, remains the working language of the field. Research, training and industrial uses grew alongside entertainment.