History of Virtual Reality | Hacker News Reader

History of Virtual Reality

vrs.org.uk

29 pointsandsoitis19 comments

This missed all of the PC VR headsets from the mid-late 90s somehow which was where all of the interesting innovation was happening. PC VR and 3D was a huge market compared things like the relatively terrible VirtualBoy.

If you want to get your fix of probably the most influential era of VR, http://www.mindflux.com.au/index.html has been around forever as a timepiece of what was happening on the PC then.

There was also VRML[1].

In 2004-2005, our team build a home layout tool for a Furniture company, where customers can place furniture in the home layout. It was not the most realistic but gave the customers a feel of the size and space allocation without having to visit the stores. We did it in Flash. In the next iteration, after a few years, VRML was attempted and we reached the stage of creating the layouts and gave up.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VRML

No Jaguar VR? The prototypes made it into wild- would have been the first consumer VR and it seemed to work really well!

https://youtu.be/1NCQJrd-4rk?feature=shared

The article is 100% correct in it's assessment that VR is not a very well-defined term, and it's not always perfectly clear what constitutes and doesn't constitute VR.

Still, trying to open it up to basically anything that's highly immersive feels wrong to me. I can deeply immerse myself into a book, becoming unconscious of my surroundings and even completely loosing track of time. Nevertheless I don't think that books count as "VR".

"Virtual" describes something that doesn't physically exist but is only (computer) simulated - thus ruling out any form of remote views through cameras, or stereoscopic pictures (or paintings). All of those are either not non-existent, or not simulated.

The article also says that:

> Many definitions also stipulate that VR must be interactive. This would differentiate it from things like 3D -movies, 360-degree video and other similar “look but don’t touch” media. The problem with this is that plenty of computer generated VR isn’t interactive at all, yet everyone considers it to be VR.

I still feel that "interaction" is a very good and meaningful differentiator, that would be helpful to employ, and that probably should be part of the definition of VR.

And yes, that does mean, that computer generated "VR" that is not interactive at all, should be defined as a 360 degree cg movie, and not as true VR. And I'm perfectly fine with that.

But if you want to keep that computer generated VR included, you can still allow for spatial control (walking/teleporting around) to be considered an "interaction" - which would allow back in a lot of that computer generated VR.

> Still, trying to open it up to basically anything that's highly immersive feels wrong to me. I can deeply immerse myself into a book, becoming unconscious of my surroundings and even completely loosing track of time. Nevertheless I don't think that books count as "VR".

"Once upon a time, there will be a little girl called Uncumber..."

https://youtu.be/VuZonQVN4uw?t=562

Oddly no mention of VRML the mid-90s Virtual Reality Markup Language !

The BBC's 1991 Horizon documentary "Colonizing Cyberspace" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VuZonQVN4uw&list=PL256A5BBCA... , co-presented by the late John Perry Barlow, was pretty good. It has a lot of coverage of Morton Heilig https://youtu.be/NF2Hd69-Tf4?list=PL256A5BBCA4A0714D&t=50 , Furness https://youtu.be/NF2Hd69-Tf4?list=PL256A5BBCA4A0714D&t=323 , and NASA https://youtu.be/NF2Hd69-Tf4?list=PL256A5BBCA4A0714D&t=451 (and a small segment on Sutherland https://youtu.be/NF2Hd69-Tf4?list=PL256A5BBCA4A0714D&t=254 ). Highlights include Furness discovering the importance of wide FOV https://youtu.be/NF2Hd69-Tf4?list=PL256A5BBCA4A0714D&t=409 , and NASA's Michael McGreevy building a HMD for his own research at NASA incorporating the LCD displays from two Citizen mini-TVs bought from Radio Shack for $79.95 each.

This list leaves out two greater Seattle area companies from the early nineties. Virtual I/O and Virtual Vision. It’s funny how much history gets lost. I suppose all of it eventually.

It also mentions Google's Cardboard, but not its successor Daydream (which sadly is also no longer with us). And it calls Palmer Luckey "Lucky". So, it's neither very good nor very comprehensive, which is a bit sad for a site that wants to be "the definitive source of virtual reality information"...

Do they get a mention in https://www.amazon.co.uk/Garage-Virtual-Reality-Linda-Jacobs... ? My copy is somewhat buried. Also no mention of the VRSIG (or VRSIG-UK) groups which were quite active in the early 90's.

It leaves out a hell of a lot from the 90s. From the interesting stuff happening on Amiga, SGI and other systems. To the late 90s web technologies like VRML.

I’m kind of surprised the F-35 Helmet Mounted Display doesn’t get a mention.

Who are the Virtual Reality Society??

No vfx1?

This page renders with 1px of left margin for me and it's very distracting.

You should check out a post from yesterday, “Why is the mouse cursor slightly tilted and not straight?”

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39248225

When I say one pixel of left margin, I don't mean there is an extra pixel before the start of text, I meat that there is only one pixel of margin between the left edge of my monitor and the beginning of the page content [1]. If I resize the browser window, the text then renders with the correct margin [2]. This is a bug in the website which occurs when that "latest news" sidebar comes into view and pushes the text all the way across the screen. You may not see it on your computer because of the monitor being a different size, I am using a laptop that has a smaller resolution than 1080.

1: https://files.catbox.moe/pieiil.png

2: https://files.catbox.moe/fyon3u.png

Without looking at their CSS, I'm going to assume you hit a sweet/bitter spot in their media queries breakpoint.

Surprising really, considering I just a window fullscreen on a standard 720p laptop display. I suppose I never bother checking my own websites for this kind of thing, but I imagined other people would (especially if they have actual designers doing stuff more complex than my single column of text).

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