He Does More Then Cut Your Grass
Who would have thought that something that had become a joke in the past would surface with a kind of vengeance? And by vengeance, I mean real honest to gawd potential.
Virtual reality. For those old enough to remember, it conjures up shudder-inducing visions of massive helmets that caused spinal damage, and horribly rendered wireframe polys that were anything but visually immersive. We have had experiments like the Nintendo Power Glove which have tried to allow us to interact with the environment in *ahem* “natural ways”, which has lead us to the era of the Kinect: hands free gaming – with dignity-free gaming as an added bonus. But real virtual reality kind of became a joke, fell by the wayside, and languished in a muddy ditch while we marched on by with our wooden wagons.
Blame the technology, I suppose. VR is meant to bring you into a world, with the goal being a suspension of disbelief at least to the point where you engage your senses on a level higher then you would if you were connected to your game would through a series of buttons and directional pads alone. Even examples of “higher end” VR systems from the past were never that impressive, with crappy graphics and lurching frame rates. Forget about having a real quality product on the consumer market. But maybe it’s time to revisit that.
Sony has mentioned that they’re working on it. They showed a headset mounted display at CES which sports twin OLED screens. Close in the user so all he sees are those screens, and then add some kind of tracking of the head and hands, feet, arms and legs, and voila! You have VR! We may actually have hardware in the home that can handle this now, with the Xbox and PS3, and the next generation of each console should pack even more horsepower under the hood to drive dual displays and track our mad flailing in our living rooms.
Is VR something that would interest people, though? Sony is betting heavily on 3D TVs, supporting it with the PS3, but there’s a growing backlash against 3D in movie theaters. It doesn’t look particularly good for Sony’s efforts. Would VR be 3D 2.0, or could it be a step beyond the current generation of motion control madness that sweeps the nation?
