You had to have a pretty good imagination to look at any 2004 phone and envision the iPhone, but once you had the 1st gen iPhone it's pretty easy to imagine a modern smartphone. It's pretty much just the same thing only more so.
Or just the phones themselves?
The limitations were obvious though. The small screen and low resolution made it hard to read much text. It was really slow, both in processor and in its 2G connection. And it was clear that there was a lot of work to be done on the software and design technology side.
The Vive feels pretty special to me too. Presence, that feeling of being in another place, a fictional place with fictional rules. Perceptually perfect hand and head tracking. The chaperone system to let you move around the room with confidence.
The limitations are obvious: high system reqs, cords everywhere, low resolution, flaky software, and again we need to question a lot of our assumptions about the kind of software that we write. All of that's being aggressively engineered away. I'm bullish.
What was your alternative way to move across the country?
It's nice to get accurate directions when you really, really need it. There's also something to be said for getting lost or wandering every now and then.
Before the iPhone, nobody had any idea what improvement on the smartphone would be required to get them in the hands of everyone. All anyone could say was "a smartphone isn't for everyone". With VR, just in this thread half the people are saying "I just hated the resolution, lack of portability and software", similarly specific objections like people had with the initial iPhone.
I actually had the opposite experience to you. The first iPhone wasn't very special to me. "So what, it accomplishes everything my current phone does, only with pinch zoom". My first Oculus dev kit experience, terrible 720p display and all was captivating.
Which I think will look like:
- Inside-out head tracking (hololens and project tango)
- Dedicated VR GPUs (heat and power issues)
- Better resolution (4k per eye is getting close to desktop screen res)
Then phones will go into 'VR mode' as we're seeing today with daydream, so it essentially rolls out automatically and without additional spending from consumers.
All incremental improvements to really take it mainstream
Sure you could technically play video games in your house on the Atari 2600, but they were so much worse than arcade games they were sort-of still a gimmick.
The NES was the first home game system whose games were good enough to get lost in. But that doesn't mean there wasn't tremendous room for improvement.