![]() And with the possible exception of the defence sector, there has been little evidence that the actual needs and limitations of the end user have been taken into consideration when these devices are being designed. We’ve had more than decades of developments with no real breakthroughs made. Won’t somebody think of the humans?Īnd that’s why I think the cult status given to the latest generation of virtual reality headsets simply beggars belief. Today, my own “Headset Hall of Shame” lecture now consists of four PowerPoint slides with thumbnail images of most (but certainly not all) HMD devices ever to reach existence. ![]() I’ve used most of the devices produced since the 1980s and, indeed, have even been involved in the sale of many since the 1990s. Sony’s withdrawal of its early Glasstron product range came about, allegedly, as a result of health and safety worries yet it is heavily involved in this latest hypefest with the rather expensive HMZ “Personal Viewer” series and, more recently, the Morpheus for the PS4 games system. A patent filed as long ago as 1960 described the Telesphere Mask, a stereoscopic “television apparatus for individual use” developed by the late, great Mort Heilig – best known for his later Sensorama “kiosk” with its canned stereoscopic films, artificially-generated smells and vibrating seat experience.Ī year later, Philco, the US electronics company famous for providing NASA with its early Mission Control consoles, announced Headsight, a single cathode ray tube “telepresence” head-mounted display and in 1968, Ivan Sutherland’s Sword of Damocles, a ceiling-linked, mechanically head-tracked stereoscopic device, enabled users to look around a simple 3D graphic as if it were “floating” in the room in front of them.īut it wasn’t until the late 1980s that commercially available products such as VPL’s EyePhone, LEEP’s CyberFace, Virtual Research’s Flight Helmet and the unbelievably unwearable Virtuality Visette, with its patented “Ergolock” head restrainer, captured the attention of the press, thus heralding a decade of false promise, high expenditure and end user disappointment.īig names like Nintendo, Olympus, Phillips and Sony all came, experimented and retreated, either disgruntled at the poor domestic market uptake or concerned about the possibility of litigations over so-called cybersickness. Even then, head-mounted displays were by no means a new concept. We were first exposed to the “wonders” of head-mounted displays in the late 1980s and throughout the 1990s, when we were told that they would revolutionise virtual reality and telepresence. It seems inevitable that large investments will be made with little return, giving some of us a distinct sense of déjà vu. Many other technology observers, from swooning journalists to corporate futurologists – a good too many of whom appear to believe everything they read or see online – are also fuelling the rush to invest in a holodeck. Even in traditionally sceptical and risk-averse sectors such as defence, aerospace, energy and education, they are fast becoming de rigeur in training exercises. The next person to claim to have invented a Star-Trek-like Holodeck is going to get a Vulcan neck pinch from me.įrustratingly, this marketing hype actually seems to be working so well that virtually reality headsets, be they binocular, biocular, or monocular (such as Google’s Glass), have become a “must have” item. Every other day, it seems, we hear of yet another allegedly ground-breaking solution in the quest for “immersion”. Anyone who subscribes to an online hi-tech gizmo newsfeed can’t have failed to notice a certain preoccupation in the past couple of years on the part of developers to bring viewers close to the action of TV, films and computer games through virtual reality. ![]()
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