headsets track your motion – when you move your head up and down and around, the display tracks your movements to give you the sensation of being in a completely different environment. The experience is pretty mindblowing, there’s no doubt that the technology itself is NOT over hyped. The first time I put on an Oculus I was blown away. You get the experience of being completely immersed – whether it’s in an imaginary landscape, or if you’re flying in a helicopter, or climbing a mountain – the experience feels so real it can give you vertigo. In fact one of the problems people have is motion sickness after wearing the headsets for too long. That’s testament to how powerful it is.
made and gave a bad name to the technology for years to come. In 2010, an 18-year old Palmer Luckey created the first prototype of the Oculus Rift, and a couple of years later he launched a wildly successful Kickstarter project that raised over $2.4 million. In 2014 Facebook paid $2 billion to acquire Oculus, and took another two years to get the product ready for commercial launch. The declining cost and increasing power of computation has finally made VR headsets under $1000 a reality – that’s really the key to breaking into the consumer market. The first headsets have shipped this year. The VR headset is completely immersive, blocking out your entire field of view. The
Gaming (and adult entertainment) are the obvious early uses for VR, but there’s a lot of exploration for different uses. You can use VR to visit a museum or historical site in school, or use it to train doctors in surgery, or to work on a golf swing. Right now the key is getting content in the market, and it’s still early days. Oculus, Sony PlaystationVR, the HTC Vive and Samsung GearVR are the major headsets on the market. VR is definitely the coolest technology to emerge in years, but the downside is that you need to wear a bulky headset, the content is still limited and you either need massive bandwidth or you need to be tethered to a PC or gaming console to get the full experience for the time being. So while it will be popular, it's more a niche technology. If you're
WHAT'S REAL ABOUT VIRTUAL REALITY by Ed Maguire