| RIP Virtual Reality |
| The Shed | |||
| Written by Murphy Simmonds | |||
| Tuesday, 04 August 2009 22:54 | |||
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Virtual Reality. Seems crazy that we ever doubted it, now that we're all living our lives through computer helmets, observes Murphy Simmonds.Remember Virtual Reality? That was a funny old craze. Well, we say "craze", but crazes generally involve large numbers of people, while Virtual Reality seemed to involve no people at all, certainly not real world ones. You saw it on the TV every now and again for a few years in the early 90s, but outside of telly land it was rarer than a chocolate unicorn. What was it, you ask? Well it was two things, really. The first was a concept - a special viewing helmet with little screens in front of your eyes which relayed images from a digital 3D world. You could navigate around it, with some kind of joystick thing if we remember correctly, and the resulting sensation was, incredibly, just like actually travelling around inside the computer generated landscape. "You can't fool your entire sense of spatial location with a magic Lego helmet" The second thing? The second thing was rubbish; Virtual Reality was a great load of stupid rubbish. 3D worlds are all well and good when they look like worlds, but the best the technology of the time could do was churn out some kind of bizarro Tetris land where everything, including people, was made from coloured blocks. The framerate stuttered like Gareth Gates on a Power Plate and mastering the controls was as easy as beatboxing with a mouthful of beans. How do we know? We had a go on it once at some computery fair at Leeds University when we were about 12 (which invalidates the second sentence of this article, until we tell you that the fair also featured chocolate unicorns, not to mention electric bees and dodos' tears) and we can confidently relay that strapping one's face into the "iconic" helmet did as much to transport us to a magical cyberspace realm as our legs did, which is to say, nothing at all. It was just a couple of screens in front of your eyes. The problem for the people of the 90s was that the concept of Virtual Reality made sense. When some bespectacled boffin trundled his way into TV studios with this Virtual Reality stuff, everyone watching thought "oh yeah, it must be true. It's like actually being there" because back then we all were clueless about computers. Your average adult's conception of the computer fell somewhere between a supermarket till and HAL from 2001, while the children who were growing up with them would believe literally anything, because they were children. Since then Red Dwarf and The Matrix and various other things have helpfully pointed out that simulating the sensation of actually being somewhere would probably require a broadband port to be installed in your spinal column. Yes, the Imax might give you motion sickness and earphones might make music sound like it's emanating from the centre of your head, but you can't fool your entire sense of spatial location with a magic Lego helmet. More articles like this Stupid Dial-Up A Theory of Time PCs at the Checkout Browse them all here The Shed Anyway, there are some glasses that you plug into your iPhone that puts little screens in front of your eyes. You know what they claim? They claim it's like watching a 52 inch screen. And you know what? We don't care if its true, because it's a damn sight better than claiming it somehow teleports you to Pretendsville then turning out to be one of the biggest disappointments of your childhood. Not that we're bitter. Get a chunk of RollZero delivered direct to your inbox with the weekly Electric Letter. Sign up in the header at the top of this page.
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B makes this comment
Thu 06 Aug 2009 19:55:30 CDT