The Rise and Fall and Rise of Virtual Reality

It was 1993, late .. I was in the Embarcadero, something like the 36th floor, to play some Spectre VR at Velocity/Peninsula, where the game was made. My pal who worked there had been working late, so we blew some millions of tank pixels way. It was bliss. Doom had hit too, so we spent a few hours at that, and then back to Spectre VR again. Testing his networking code. By the time we walked out satisfied it was working, it was Saturday morning, and the sun was up in San Francisco. As we left his office, he gave me "Snow Crash" to take with me, for it was company reading and he'd read it already. It was motivating.

On the ground level of Embarcadero, as we left to trudge into our bunks across the bay, there was one of the first headset-VR shop/setups, running .. I think .. 'Dino'. It made me puke if I played for a few minutes, but it was neat that 'VR', back then, 'was coming .. soon'.

A few years later, there were the flight-sim centers around the SGI neighborhood. HUD's of pixels, or something.

Anyway, I still like to read Snow Crash every few years or so. Next month I'll probably do a workshop with some Dutch friends in Den Haag, with their new Occulus Rift headsets.. so to this old grizzly, it seems people want VR, even still. Gotta solve the puke factor, at least in my case, first though ..

Oddly, both VR essays utterly fail to load or render w/o JS active.

If you block voxmedia.com this page loads as a wall of text. Here's a copy https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?strip=1&q=cach...

You could also 'disable page style' to read it.

yeah, its not like that feature covers the occulus rift, the sony morpheus, and if they'll even succeed at all.

great sponsorship.

Have you watched any of the reaction videos on YouTube? I don't think we've seen anything like this with VR before.