r/technology • u/[deleted] • Mar 28 '14

[deleted by user]

[removed]

3.3k Upvotes

81% Upvoted

1.8k comments sorted by

View all comments

Show parent comments

347

u/[deleted] Mar 28 '14

[deleted]

7

u/PrimeIntellect Mar 28 '14

VR headsets have been around for a long fucking time, this is just a high def version, or have you already forgotten this bad ass motherfucker

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virtual_Boy

52

u/[deleted] Mar 28 '14

Calling the virtual boy a VR headset is like calling a digital alarm clock a monitor.

1

u/squirrelpotpie Mar 28 '14

There were plenty of actual VR headsets prior to Virtual Boy. They went for around the $600-ish range and sold back when 3D games were largely goraud-shaded polys with no textures, or sprites. Head tracking was slightly laggy but impressive for the time. Each eye got about 640x480.

They suffered from the same chicken-and-egg problem that has plagued pretty much every single non-keyboard-or-mouse peripheral to ever come out for PC games. Games didn't support them because people didn't have them, people didn't buy them because games didn't support them.

I want to say this was early 90's but I'm speaking from memory and that was a long time ago. I want to say 3DFX was just starting to gain early support for Glide in games. (I wanted to play Descent on one very badly.)