Over at The Guardian, Charles Arthur has posted a very interesting article reagarding Virtual Reality : The return of virtual reality: ‘this is as big an opportunity as the internet’. What I find very interesting about this article is that it highlights hope, hype, caution and excitement. There’s also a really cool video from 1994 during an earlier round of Virtual Reality hype which I’ll embed later in this post.
Many of us know about the hype, we’ve seen it with virtual worlds and whereas virtual worlds have delivered in many ways, they haven’t delivered in that massive way that many were predicting they would a decade or so ago.
Predictions about the boom in Virtual Reality go back a lot further and the article points this out. Charles talks to Dr Jonathan Waldern, who has seen the hype and hope before but is absolutely revelling in the new found VR hope wave and is quoted as saying :
There will be people crying in this, people falling in love, people falling over. For all sorts of reasons, this strikes at the core of being a human being. It’s so compelling … this is as big an opportunity as the internet.
I think we’ve heard claims such as that before too. However Dr Jonathan Waldern isn’t new to the VR scene, he was involved with a company called Virtuality in the 1990’s who had been bringing VR to arcades. The company had been in talks with Atari about bringing their VR Headset, Jaguar, to the consumer market, and then, with very little warning, the hype and hope for VR died.
However one of the hurdles in the last wave of VR hype was cost. Dr Waldern’s company were using top of the range Silicon Graphics systems, which were not in the consumer end of the market at all, they cost six figure sums for a start. These days people have more power and better graphics at far lower costs. Dr Waldern points out some of the differences this time around :
“Our system used some of the very first Sony LCDs, with 300 by 200 pixels,” Waldern recalls. “Today you get 1,080p [1,080 horizontal lines] minimum, and by the launch next year you’ll probably have 4K by 4K. And the computational power is transformational – we were working on about a megaflop, and each machine cost about $70,000, which is a massive barrier to adoption. Now with an Nvidia GPU you’re talking about a teraflop.”
However even today, there are those who are enthusiastic but don’t feel we’re quite there yet.
Continue reading “The Return Of Virtual Reality Or The Return Of Hype?”
