Keeping 1990s Virtual Reality Machines Alive

I remember I tried a VR device in 2000. It consisted of a VR glass with two mini CRT monitors. There was a frame with a bike seat and cable with motors hanging from the ceiling. To fly through the remarkable good 3D world (for its day) there was a heavy glove with some cables attached. It was powered by a Silicon Graphics/SGI super computer standing next by. I never got the same immersive experience that allows one to fly in VR 3D since than. Flying downwards through a mediaeval city 3D environment felt really like being Superman because the whole body was oriented by servo motors. I could fell the blood going in my head. And had the slight fear that the heavy glove falls of my arm. So flying upwards or horizontal gave a better and more rewarding feeling.

Nowadays these VR glasses are still heavy, but smaller due to LCD. But we will never get the full immersive experience without a device that moves the body accordingly to the 3D experience.

I had a summer job writing an app for an early VR headset back in the late 90s; an early i-Glasses model, IIRC.

It was awful. Terrible, terrible, terrible. The twin 320x240 LCDs were okay, if you like a graininess and a tiny field of view, but the true horror was the head-tracking: like these arcade headsets it used electronic compasses to determine the headset's orientation, and in a steel frame building, in a university, in an office above the Physics Department's NMR lab, it basically didn't work at all.

The 9600 baud serial link which it used to send position information back to the PC (in ASCII!) added an exciting few hundred milliseconds of latency, but nausea wasn't a problem as the random jitter, slow sideways tilt and occasional random spins as someone downstairs powered up the NMR had already rendered the view incomprehensible...

I remember trying one of these in the 90s. Very expensive for very short games. One of the “Virtuality” systems was installed in 1993 in Berlin [1] and is still playable at the Computergames Museum [2].

[1](in german) http://www.technikjournal.de/cms/front_content.php?idcat=58&...

[2](in english) http://www.computerspielemuseum.de/1292_Highlights_of_famous...

I'm glad someone is still looking after these machines. I used to read about it in Zzap! 64 magazine [1] and drew Virtuality & W Industries logos on my primary school gear as if it was the Tesla of its time. Especially this press photo made me think Jon Waldern was like a 90s Tony Stark / Elon Musk [2]. I still love the design of their hardware even now, the glossy black & T2-esque typeface & the industrial aesthetic of the cables & metal chequered floor plates. (I suspect I'm the only one.)

We finally got Virtuality in Australia (Perth) a couple of years later, and I spent a ton of time in Dactyl Nightmare at the VR arcade with friends. But the place only had a couple of machines, which meant long queues of watching the TV displays with the current players. I think it cost $10 per 10 minute experience as well. It's really no wonder the place closed down after about a year... but as a kid, I loved it.

[1] http://www.zzap64.co.uk/cgi-bin/displaypage.pl?issue=088&pag...

[2] http://images.eurogamer.net/2012/articles//a/1/4/7/4/5/9/5/V...

Heh, I used to own one of these 1000-series machines. In my case it was a unit that had been owned by a company's R&D department, so they'd stripped out a bunch of the "arcade machine" stuff, and all it had when I got it was the (19" rackmount) box with the computer in it, plus the helmet and bumbag -- I didn't have the pod you stand in or the hand-held trigger unit, and the software installation was a bit screwed up. Still, you could play the flight-simulator game. I think the main problems with it as a technology were low resolution and the fact the helmet was stupidly heavy.

As the Kotaku article says, it's basically an Amiga A3000 -- the 19" rackmount box had an A3000 with the lid off screwed to the bottom of it. The A3000 had two custom graphics cards with TI graphics processors, one per eye. Head and glove position sensing were handled by what I think was an off-the-shelf Polhemus tracker board, which sent its output via RS232 to the Amiga serial port. Mounted above the A3000 was the "format board" which was a big custom PCB which did a bunch of miscellaneous work: power supplies, audio amplifiers, joystick calibration circuitry, etc.

(I don't have the thing any more, passed it on to somebody else many years ago, but it was a fun toy to have for a while.)

I've been hoping to play Dactyl Nightmare on something this generation (as well as Descent, which had 3d support at the time).

I was wondering when these things would pop back up. I got to use one exactly once and it blew my young mind.

I'm pretty sure the Virtuality 1000 is the VR machine I played once back in the early 90s. It was absolutely awful.

Edit: This comment sounds a bit negative. It's great that someone is maintaining these ultra rare bits of history.

I've tried the Amiga based VR contraption in the 90s. Before I got on, the excitement in the queue was unbelievable. Just as much as the disappointment afterwards. I think this marked the first time I was really disillusioned by technology.

I always wanted to try one of these as a young kid. It was always WAY to expensive, so I never got to do it. I am really excited about the current VR resurgence, especially the experiences available at the low-end.

Thanks Peter Thiel for killing this type of journalism. Truly those that report on 1990s virtual reality games are in your words "al qaeda". Kudos.