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Comment by orvado | Hacker News Reader

Wow, all this talk about VR in 1993 ... it would be interesting to read the history on that. Either the world wasn't ready for it or the implementation was very lame (something like Nintendo StarFox or worse yet ... BattleZone)

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There was a lot of excitement about VR in the early 90's, but it was not driven by the game industry. I had the rare experience of using a VR hang glider simulator that was exhibited at SIGGRAPH in 1993. I was just a kid then, but it was far more impressive than any gaming system.

Looks like the hang glider simulator is mentioned in this book, "Sex, Drugs and Tessellation: The Truth About Virtual Reality, as Revealed in the Pages of CyberEdge Journal" [1]

SIGGRAPH has been called "the original VR meetup." [2] Much of the VR technology back then was used for military training/simulation and wasn't shown to the world [3].

[1] https://www.amazon.com/Sex-Drugs-Tessellation-Revealed-Cyber...

[2] Siggraph's VR Pioneers Panel – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kdB8k_qn7qM

[3] http://www.verycomputer.com/279_26cdca95e0a26462_1.htm

Having tried both the "VR" of 1993 and the VR of today, I would argue it's nearly incorrect for them to have the same name. The goal was the same, but the technology to do decent VR didn't exist back then. There's a certain amount of responsiveness and optical clarity required for a decent VR experience.

Sega VR was never released due to many of the same issues that made Nintendo's Virtual Boy a failure. Among these were how expensive the unit was, its poor graphical capabilities and most notably its eyestrain / headache inducing effects after a short period of play time [1]. However, as with all things SEGA at least we got a cheesy keynote presentation out of it [2].

[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20100114191355/http://sega-16.co...?

[2] https://youtu.be/yd98RGxad0U

To be blunt, it made people sick. I was there, I saw the queazy faces at the end of the demo. I was "hardware boy" in the producer ranks and when that came up, I passed. I'm not sure they would have given it to me, but I made it clear I would not want to work on it.

Haha amazing keynote.

Think more flat plane with software scaled sprite-based rocks moving along the ground approximating motion.

Assuming you missed it the first time around, I'd recommend taking a look at Virtuality, which gives an idea of what early 90s VR looked like.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=L60wgPuuDpE

Oh my god the framerate. And the pixel density. I'm getting sick just looking at the YouTube video and thinking of being in there.

It wasn't quite that bad. But it wasn't all that good, either. Still astonishing, especially for its time, and worth experiencing back then for the sake of having done so - but not really something you'd seek out on its own merit, even when it was new.

Jesus that headset! Looks like he's putting on a jetpack or something..

When all you have is CRTs....

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