A man who invented VR goggles 50 years too soon (2016)
spectrum.ieee.org
spectrum.ieee.org
It was only non-functioning mockup, at best, because the vacuum tube electronics of the era was simply incapable of producing a wireless device with those capabilities and weighing 140 (!!!) grams.
Compare that with the first actual working HMD which was the Sutherland's "Sword of Damocles" boom-mounted display from 1968.
EDIT: It was George Meliès not Lumiere brothers who made the famous film. Thanks for correcting me.
I agree that execution is everything in terms of winning, though.
This is why patents are harmful imo (without even getting into patent trolls), all they do is restrict the commercialization to the one who was the fastest gun in the west at the patent office and hold back society from developing the technology further because the patentee has no incentive to improve the idea while they enjoy a two decade state sanctioned monopoly.
For example, new pharmaceuticals (of which there are very few being discovered) take over 10 years of R&D and cost multiple billions of dollars to whittle down ~10,000 candidates into a single government approved drug.
But once that single drug has been identified from the haystack of failing options, and rigorously tested, and trialed in humans for years, recreating that molecule is quite trivial. The actual production is very cheap compared to the fact it took thousands of people billions of dollars over 10+ years to get there.
This is just one example of how ideas can be very expensive to develop, but very cheap to copy.
This sort of live saving research is the best contender for R&D by government grants, if it's a worthy cause it can be supported for a long time (like fusion is being), and when the solution is found it can be immediately shared and sold at cost for the benefit of everyone, not hoarded by one company and sold at a ridiculous price to people that are forced to buy it or die.
In terms of novel drugs introduced per year (not just repackaging existing drugs), the EU as a bloc is consistently behind the US. So, their scientific spending doesn't seem to be paying off in pharmaceuticals.
As an aside, there are plenty of inventions that were developed or rediscovered long after they were technologically feasible. The whole Middle Ages occurred because we forgot how to do things they knew how to do in ancient times and never documented, like how to use concrete. Other things were just never thought of until much later, like the analog phonograph could have been created in ancient times but no one tried running a pin over a grooved surface.
A player piano is a better example.
Antiquity probably had many inventions thta died out when the local village did. Life was expensive, and capital hard to come by. If a patron wasn't interested and aware, development stalls.
It’s definitely possible to make a recording without electricity, it just requires steady source of rotation for engraving, so maybe a spring or motor was a necessary precursor to make it useful.
Some seem so obvious that it seems likely that many people dreamt of them at the same time. Hard to tell in this case.
So there may some some first mover advantage in being lucky enough to be (among) the first to have an idea, but first mover itself is of debatable advantage.
Help me see why you think an original idea can be priceless?
Several other things really are valuable, one thing that surprises people is that Advertising is actually valuable, if nobody knows you made this thing/ service/ whatever then they can't benefit from it. Now obviously there's a big gap between "Have you heard about bicycles? I was dubious at first but it was surprisingly easy to learn how to use it" and the pop-up insisting that maybe you've got Restless Leg Syndrome and should ask your doctor - but fundamentally advertising delivers some value for our society.
I think your line of thinking discounts how absolutely novel and groundbreaking even the idea was. It's an example of someone seeing something about reality that basically the rest of the population of the world managed to miss. I think that's pretty special - even if there was no realistic plan to implement the idea.
If you're trying to create a commercial device, the idea is such tiny part of what it takes to deliver a successful product that it is close to worthless on its own.
But the context here is science fiction, where good ideas are a major part of it. (The other major parts are good characters and storytelling, but it's the ideas that distinguish science fiction from other kinds of fiction.)
So give the guy his due.
He looked ahead and tried to envision where technology was going, and, in this case anyway, pretty much nailed it 50 years out.
Just to nitpick, it was Jules Verne's idea. The Lumieres just put it on screen.
Or calling out click-bait and hype now requires filed patents and other "inventor" credentials?
FYI, I have 20+ years research and commercial experience developing virtual reality solutions, including published papers in scientific journals. Unlike patents and far-fetched ideas left for others to sort out, journal papers actually require results to be demonstrated and undergo peer review.
Does that qualify, Mr throwaway account?
A huge amount of constant "boring" percent-point improvement work or price-shifts are required to unlock the interesting changes, and often the people and companies associated with those new discoveries and ways of doing things are not really the first at all, but rather the lucky or the ruthless.
[1] - https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1615147/quotes/?item=qt1531207&...
It's the first 30s of this clip, for the curious. (Movie is a bit dry but pretty good.)
The real question isn't why did OpenAI get there first but why Google didn't, they had every advantage.
They might have had similar or better technical AI capabilities, but they aren’t great at productizing it.
I disagree. Google does have great products, Google Maps, Search, GMail etc.
Search: 1998 Gmail: 2004 Maps: 2005
Has Google ever taken a risk that endangered their ad business?
All the while this was going on Google slept - I think the reasons for this are varied and many, stretching into company culture, structure, processes etc. This was after researchers at Google created the Transformer architecture in the first place.
Google seemed to panic suddenly when ChatGPT was released. I think this is when the people who could actually make change realised that ChatGPT could be a threat to Google in a number of ways - including for search market share.
And let people try it for free. Non-techies were using it and the news was reporting on it. They nailed their launch.
But it's an illustration of what you describe: When the iPhone and later iPad were launched, a lot of people thought they were new.
Even though there had been a whole fad of touch devices in phone and tablet form that had come and gone before the iPhone came.
A lot of us dismissed them at first because we'd seen that fad come and go, without realising that the genius of Apple with respect to those devices was not in the technical innovation, but in recognising when enough percent-point improvements had been made to unlock something that'd actually appeal to the general public.
"Our" tablet was tethered to a custom DECT base station (wifi wasn't widespread yet), had about 2 hours of battery. The resistive touch was awful, the screen resolution was small, and I had to cram Linux and the GUI, with space left over for a port of Opera, in to 16MB of flash and 16MB RAM in the original prototype...
In retrospect it had no chance in hell. But to a geek like me it was amazingly cool.
Other tablets and pda's with or without network and phone of that era were either attempts at slimming down laptops (e.g. I had a laptop with a touch screen on a swivel back then) that were still way too big, or they were devices like ours, with all sorts of limitations that geeks were fine with, and regular people weren't.
So when these devices disappeared one after the other, many of us dismissed the concept as a whole as tried and failed, rather than realise that the problem was one of enough percent-point improvements and not the concept.
And for all of the many issues I have with Apple, while they were not first, they still deserve plenty of credit for simply being smart enough to recognise when the time was right for this category of devices. Because a whole lot of companies got that timing extremely wrong.
None of the choices that compromised our device - or those of most of our competitors - were choices we made because we thought they were right, or best, but because we were forced to by timing and what was available at what cost, and failed to realize that the result was too compromised to stand a chance.
Put another way: Had Apple launched an iPad in 2000, it would've had exactly the same hardware usability issues. There were no good, cheap enough touch screens, or displays, or cheap enough RAM, or cheap enough flash, to deliver what they did later at that time at any price, much less affordable enough.
Timing it when the available components were good enough and cheap enough was how they got it usable and affordable.
Trying too early and drawing the wrong conclusions was also why a lot of their competitors had moved onto a very different track in terms of design.
If you e.g. look at Palm devices that started to get network connectivity etc., from ~2000, you'll see the grid of (user-installable) apps w/touch and no keyboard, and Blackberry-like devices w/keyboard "won" for a while because people took users rejection of crappy, limited resistive touch as a rejection of touch. (I walked around with a Palm device for several years from '98 or so, and couldn't understand why "normal people" rejected them - it felt like scifi)
[EDIT: UMPC was from 2006; and not the type of devices I'm talking about - they're a couple of generations of hardware later; the UMPC if anything were part of that bastardization of the earlier touch focused devices as manufacturers declared the "cleaner" devices dead and buried in the market place without understanding why]
Most breakthrough inventions, in areas where people fumbled for years or decades, could have been released long before with earlier insight. Maybe not as advanced, but if the right things were done right they still would have been a win.
Many of those "right things" were more practicality, psychological, or fit for market, not just waiting around to jump the moment the "right" tech component arrived.
Breakthrough products also tend to take competitors by surprise. If the breakthrough product didn't happen, it could be years before any other team comes together with the same focus and insights.
So timing a little bit. The vision is important, but often was a common dream. The real rare resources are a very clear vision, stable highly supportive management, a densely talented team, and an intensely iterative focus, and a willingness to go deep and get previously unavailable specialized components made.
Somehow "timing" always follows those last resources.
They didn't take technical genius. All the elements preceded them. Most of the design preceded thrm. They didn't engineer anything particularly new. The only previously unavailable component they got made was better glass, which was great, but not where the deal breaker was for previous iterations.
I find it funny when people want to declare Apple as visionary geniuses over the tech, when the path from earlier devices to the iPhone and iPad was so clear, and given what I know about design discussions etc. in that space.
There would have been multiple devices very similar to the iPad had the components existed. The vision was there, the supportive management was there, the talent was there because frankly none of it is complicated, and people iterated for years. None of that means anything when the components just do not exist yet.
Actually the one genius move was doing an 100% touch-with-thumb interface.
They gave up on revenue for replacement styluses though :)
So this boils down to capacitative touch of sufficient quality having gotten cheap enough.
The funny thing is with number of those kinds of early devices I had for use or testing, they all seemed awesome at the time, but I know I probably shouldn't ever pick any of them up again, because I know logically that the experience would be awful given what I know about the tech and compared to current iterations of the same tech... It's funny how memory works.
I still wish for the reality where having a pure-unadulterated Linux installation on a tablet that early remained a thing, though - the current locked-down tablet ecosystems in many ways (but not the hardware!) still feels like a big step back in many respects.
That sounds quite mediocre! Except where were all these non-geniuses with their just-as-not-new phones putting Microsoft, Palm, Sony, Blackberry, etc., to shame? Most of that was crap in comparison. And despite many (many) revamped product lines (Microsoft!) trying to take smart phones mainstream. (I give the Blackberry kudos for being very good at what it did.)
You are vastly underestimating the value and work of getting lots of details right (so many, and so "unimportant", most people never notice what holds products back), and finding a way to fit it all together in a way that works well.
You know what is true of every breakthrough theorem in math? If you break down the proof, its just made of steps of already known relations. It wouldn't be a proof if it was otherwise. Nothing new.
They had built phones with the same kind of interfaces 4-5 years earlier, and then moved on because the hardware wasn't ready then. You keep comparing to products that appears because of the market rejection of the first tablet/touch device fad, and use that to argue that it was timing, while ignoring the many devices that were conceptually far more similar a few years before that.
As I've said: Apple's genius was paying attention to when the hardware was ready for another try at the "pure" devices that "everyone" else tried too early.
And bringing up the Blackberry is comical to me, because even at the time it was an aberrant offshoot used by people who scoffed at the touch-focused devices, and not a relevant comparison. They were an entirely different device category.
> You are vastly underestimating the value and work of getting lots of details right (so many, and so "unimportant", most people never notice what holds products back), and finding a way to fit it all together in a way that works well.
No, I'm aware of the products that were actually built over the preceding years and which design decisions were driven purely by what was actually available vs. were intentional choices, and so don't give credit for simply having better, cheaper components available. Apple does great at polishing things, and they deserve credit for that, but what the 1st gen iPhone and iPad brought was not that.
The also did great at timing it right, and I do give them a lot of credit for that, and that is important - a whole lot of smart people got that very wrong, and frankly it's a lesson the tech industry needs hammered in over and over because we have a tendency to rush ahead without asking ourselves if the market is ready and/or if a product is wrong or just not right yet, and ending up making stupid decisions. I'm not trying to downplay what Apple achieved. I'm trying to drive home the point that Apple achieved this by vastly outperforming their competitors in deploying their resources in a more efficient way, by not rushing into something that was doomed (in the 2000 timeframe). That was, and is, impressive.
"Just" building a smartphone and tablet at the level of the original iPhone and iPad was good, but nothing special, nor visionary in terms of engineering. They had one or two features that were unusual (gestures was), and lots of missing features, and great industrial design, but very little technical innovation. Overall they did amazingly well in hitting the right balance for a first version, and that outweighs pushing the envelope on the technical side by a huge margin - it's irrelevant if you make technical advances if your company folds and/or the product disappears of the face of the earth.
> You know what is true of every breakthrough theorem in math? If you break down the proof, its just made of steps of already known relations. It wouldn't be a proof if it was otherwise. Nothing new.
Great, but this again implies that there were lots of elements that were put together in some completely novel way, but there were not, and suggesting there were is just pure revisionism that just shows that you're unaware of what that field was like in those years.
Nobody went around wondering if capacitative touch would be better or not - we all knew it was. Nobody wanted as little RAM or flash as in the early devices. Nobody wanted big bezels. Nobody wanted slow CPUs. Nobody wanted low capacity batteries. All of the steps to go from ~2000-era tablets and full-screen touch devices to an iPhone and iPad level device were cost-reduction and component improvements.
Heck, the original iPhone didn't even have installable apps, which was a huge step back compared to earlier devices that was only rectified later when Apple realised they'd made a huge misstep (remember Steve Jobs pushing web apps as sufficient? I do).
Apple got the timing right, and then they did an amazing job at iterating to fix the many defects in their original product before their competitors realised they'd gotten the timing right. Getting the timing right was genius. That's impressive enough that there's no reason to push unsupportable ideas about things that weren't new. Most of the things I've mentioned weren't new when I worked on them in 2000 either - we invented next to nothing, and we knew we didn't.
compare iphone to the mobile of the day and it becomes obvious why it won.
and thats what excites me the most about the vision pro. when Apple steps in, its generally a signal that the tech has achieved a certain critial mass.
vision pro is going to incentivise a lot of hardware manufacturers to start building components for the VR market and increase the ecoomies of scale for other vr systems.
Put another way, android wouldn't exist or be relevant if iphone didnt show us what a smart phone could be. now I can go to any store and buy a cheap andrpid for $200. is it as good as a modern flagship iphone? of course not. but it holds up well against any 4 year old iphone.
Smartphones weren't new, but one where you didn't have to rely on buttons or an input pen on a terrible resistive touchscreen on the other hand was a big improvement. I still miss phones with qwerty keyboards but not the UIs before the iPhone.
This is the one I worked on then:
https://linuxdevices.org/freepad-norways-alternative-to-swed...
The screenshots you see are real (the phone dialler even has the name of one of the employees up...). The GUI was NanoX, which is still around (and despite the name it's not an X11 server, but has partial X11 source-level compatibility; we built our own toolkit for it).
And even that, of course, was a testament to the limitations - we picked NanoX and writing our own toolkit not because we wanted to but because fitting an actual X11 server cost too much in terms of extra RAM and flash. It added many months of engineering. Fun months, but time that'd have been better spent on more applications.
I still love that project, but the hardware limitations gimped it so painfully.
My first job out of engineering school was working for Dr. Robert Jarvik, of artificial heart fame.
He has a patent where there is a drawing of a person, on a treadmill, with cables tied to each joint. The idea is it's a virtual reality exercise setup. A Nintendo wii or kinect before sensors were any good.
https://patents.google.com/patent/US5577981A/en?q=(exercise)...
The Quest can be a PCVR headset with a 3.2 Gen 1 cable, ie 5 Gbps. How different is this?
I’m pretty sure outboarding most of the hardware that’s not speaker, camera, or screen is plenty doable. It just blows Meta’s selling point of making it a self-contained device. I’d probably prefer it though, especially if I could attach the outboard module to the back of the head strap as a counterweight.
Hardware decoding / encoding all of those video streams requires a lot of processing power on both ends, adds 10s of ms of latency, and makes the video quality worse.
Let's say DSC is allowed, which costs microseconds and is basically invisible, and can compress down to about 8 bits per pixel.
That USB cable can transmit 20Gbps in each direction. The display needs to do 23 million pixels 90 times a second, and at 8 bits per pixel that's about 17Gbps.
The video cameras going the other way are 13 million pixels for the main cameras plus some amount more for the 6 tracking cameras and the other sensors. And those main cameras are outputting 8 bits per pixel before any compression is applied.
It's a tight fit at that bitrate, but we can upgrade to USB4 and get 40Gbps in each direction. That leaves plenty of room for everything, and makes sure there's headroom for HDR and 100Hz and whatnot. It works out.
So when talking about how many people have cell phones, the difference between "mid 90s" and "late 90s" makes a big difference :)
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_best-selling_mobile_ph...
Other countries will have different specific times when this happened, but my impression is that cell phones largely took off in a lot of countries in the same way, because competition and high prices for spectrum meant the large telcos suddenly had a reason to poor vast amounts of cash into pushing cellphones almost "overnight", and suddenly even if you didn't have one yourself you'd at least know enough people that it wasn't anything unusual any more.
I'm 48. While I've seen many technical changes, and been part of e.g. driving internet adoption (the company I worked at in '95 was an internet service provide I co-founded, and triggered a price war on internet access in Norway with, that we soundly lost but at least it helped significantly change the market), but none of those changes - including the internet adoption - had such extremely rapid, very visible, effect on society in such a short period of time
(I think pervasive internet access has probably made a bigger difference in the long run, but of course part of that was also enabled by cellphones, but it took longer for it to shape things as visibly)
2) I graduated in the early '00s and I think maybe 5% of the kids in my graduating class, at most, had a cell phone by graduation. Mostly some shitty Nokia with a phone-only or low-texting plan (texting was still crazy-expensive), mainly for contacting parents about after school activity stuff.
Middle-class-spectrum car-dependent exurb. Maybe it was different for, like, kids growing up in Brooklyn or something? Or rich kids, perhaps.
A more-common perk for children of free-spending parents, in my town, was still a second POTS line, though I do think that was starting to tip the other way just at the end.
The US was far behind on mobile phones for a long time.
Edit: The source is page 79 of this life magazine https://archive.org/details/LifeV55n0419630726 Reading this makes it clear this was purely a mockup of an idea he had and not a functional device.
>Sex has not distracted him in the slightest, however, from his lifelong interest in electronic gadgetry and in the new horizons being opened by the advance of more orthodox scientific knowledge. Neither has it inhibited his bent for invention on those occasions when he feels that duty and circumstance demand it —although he now invents only in broad outline, leaving the actual mechanics of the thing to others. His television eyeglasses —a device for which he feels millions yearn— constitute a ease in point
>When the idea for this handy, pocket-size portable TV set occurred to him in 1936, he was forced to dismiss it as impractical. But a few weeks ago, feeling that the electronics industry was catching up with his New Deal-era concepts, he ordered some of his employees to build a mock-up.
>"It is now perfectly possible to make thin, inch-square cathode lubes," he says, and to run them with low-voltage current from very small batteries with no danger at all of electrocuting the wearer. Sound can carried to the ear just as in a hearing aid. Television eyeglasses should weigh only about five ounces. Since there will be a picture for each eye, the glasses will make a stereoptical view possible and since they will be masked —like goggles— they can be used in bright sunlight. The user can take them out of his pocket anywhere, slip them on, flip a switch and turn to his favorite station." A V-type aerial protrudes from the top of Gernsback’s mock-up of the TV glasses. He likes the effect which can only he described as neo-Martian.
Here's pre-1963 work mentioned in a patent application at https://patents.google.com/patent/US20180224936A1/en?q=(Tele...
> Morton Heilig's next commercial offering was the Telesphere Mask (patented 1960) and was the first example of a head-mounted display (HMD), albeit for a non-interactive film medium without any motion tracking. The headset provided stereoscopic 3D and wide vision with stereo sound.
> In 1961, two Philco Corporation engineers (Comeau & Bryan) developed the first precursor to the HMD as we know it today—the Headsight. It incorporated an independent video screen for each eye and a magnetic motion tracking system, which was linked to a closed circuit camera. The Headsight was not actually developed for virtual reality applications (the term didn't exist then), but to allow for immersive remote viewing of dangerous situations by the military. Head movements would move a remote camera, allowing the user to naturally look around the environment. Headsight was the first step in the evolution of the VR head mounted display but it lacked the integration of computer and image generation.
Here's Heilig's patent for "Stereoscopic-television apparatus for individual use" https://patents.google.com/patent/US2955156A/en?q=(Morton)&i... , filed in 1957 and granted in 1960. Not only was it a head-mounted display, but it included air tubes so the wearer could feel a breeze, and optionally smell scents.
Headsight was on the cover of the magazine "Electronics" in 1961, https://archive.org/details/sim_electronics_1961-11-10_34_45... , and the article shows it actually worked, and was not a mockup.
This tank simulator from the 1970s is a great example of early VR: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AcQifPHcMLE I wonder if there's anything earlier..
> This article appears in the December 2016 print issue as “Before Virtual Reality Was Cool.”
All that aside, the thing actually worked - you could turn your head and the display updated and you could fly around. Remarkable for the time.
* actually they have been used before, but they didn't manage to generate religious like fanaticism until the past few years.
I have this thought that maybe the problem with VR isn't the display technology but the input. Walking forward in a straight line is more or less an unsolvable problem. Motion sickness, the need of a frickin' threadmill, it's just messy. Touch feedback is an unsolvable problem unless you introduce robot gloves that can break your fingers. And then we have the question of use cases. VR solves a very specific spatial problem with an interconnection between perspective and hand movement. Very few problems exist in that space. It sometimes seems like VR creates more problems than it solves, in fact.
I low key believe in AR (although Apple finally played its cards and the result was underwhelming). Something about infinite and freely positioned 3D monitors. But VR? Great for cockpit sims and maybe some very specific professional uses. But useless for 99% of tasks of an average person.
In any case, the technology seems pretty close. If it takes another 3-10 years for tech to advance enough Meta is in a great position to execute as we get there.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AcQifPHcMLE
It's not really VR, or is it? It's a model.