Platform · 4 entries · 2012 to 2016
Virtual reality was announced as the future of games twice. The first attempt, in the 1990s, could not deliver it. The second, built on parts made cheap by the phone industry, mostly can.
The first commercial wave arrived in the early 1990s, in arcades and briefly in living rooms, and it ran into physics. Displays were too coarse, head tracking lagged behind the movement of the neck, and the gap between what the inner ear reported and what the eyes saw made a substantial share of users ill. Hardware costs were high, sessions were short, and the software was thin. By the middle of the decade the field had been largely abandoned by the game industry as an expensive dead end.
It returned around 2012, when a crowdfunded development kit showed that displays and motion sensors mass-produced for smartphones could solve the problems that sank the earlier attempt. Serious investment followed, including an acquisition by a social network that framed headsets as a future computing platform rather than a game accessory. Consumer headsets for computers shipped in 2016, followed by one that worked with an existing console, and standalone units later removed the cable and the host machine entirely, which lowered the price of entry considerably and moved headsets out of the study and into the living room.
The honest present-day assessment is mixed. Comfort has improved, tracked hand controllers made interaction natural in a way the 1990s never managed, and a handful of releases have shown what the medium can do that a flat screen cannot. Adoption remains far below what the investment assumed, sessions stay short for most people, and motion discomfort has been reduced rather than eliminated. Entries in this category cover both waves, including the failures, because the failures explain what the second attempt had to fix.
4 entries filed under virtual reality headsets. Expand any of them for the key facts, or open an entry for the full record and its sources.
A campaign aimed at developers rather than consumers funded a rough head-mounted display built from inexpensive phone parts. It brought money, talent and attention back to a field the industry had written off.
Facebook agreed to purchase Oculus for roughly two billion dollars, describing headsets as a future computing platform rather than a game accessory. The deal transformed the field's funding and unsettled many of its early supporters.
The first consumer Oculus Rift shipped in late March 2016 and the HTC Vive, with room-scale tracking and motion controllers, arrived days later. Working virtual reality was on sale after decades of false starts.
PlayStation VR worked with an ordinary PlayStation 4 and a camera instead of a high-end computer. It became the best-selling headset of its generation and reached households with no interest in gaming computers.
