9/25/2023 0 Comments Virtual boy![]() ![]() Hype is a leading killer among new technologies and the products that contend to harness them. Each step we take technologically we wait on bated breath that this can be “the one.” Each company girds up their loins in attempt to pull Excalibur from the stone and be the rightful heir to keys of the virtual reality kingdom.Īnd every time one of these companies fail, we judge them harshly. And this audience, has been the same since the dawn of this myth of virtual reality. The same audience that Oculus, HTC Vive, and Playstation VR produce their products for is the same that Yokoi saw emerging in the early 1990’s. You know the one that says we can be “transported to a virtual utopia?” Product Designers are left scratching their heads at the choice of it’s binoculars-on-a-stand contraption and the use of only red and black colors.Īnd maybe our obsession with the myth of virtual reality. Some critics attribute the Virtual Boy’s demise to lack of a variety of playable games and a dizzying gaming experience. At almost $200 it was hardly a convenient purchase. It used stereoscopic 3D and parallax to give the illusion of depth in the video game. The battery-powered gaming console was a 32-bit stand-alone tabletop system. The Virtual Boy indeed looked futuristic for the time and had a monochrome display of only black and red graphics. ![]() When they announced the Virtual Boy, releasing in the summer of 1995, they began a $25 million advertising campaign to show off this innovation. Touted to be the “first virtual reality system developed and produced for the mass market,” the Virtual Boy was a creation of Gunpei Yokoi and a technology company from Massachusetts. ![]() It was developing the trust and affection of a nation of video game lovers by the early 1990s. In the journey to becoming a household name Nintendo was coming off the successes of the Nintendo Entertainment System and the Super NES. “It will transport game players into a virtual utopia with sights and sounds unlike anything they’ve ever experienced.” - Hiroshi Yamauchi Since 1968, when Ivan Sutherland and Bob Sproull created and developed the first VR headset, Damocles, we have seen a few resurgences of our cultural obsession with Virtual Reality.Īnd the most nostalgic one for me? The Nintendo Virtual Boy. Just like most tech trends, it seems the love affair with VR burns bright (and flickers out just as quickly) about once a decade. You see, this is not the first time the consumers of the tech community found themselves immersed in overwhelming hype for virtual reality. Perhaps, this time it is growing pains, but even to get to this point, there have been many past failures and a lot of overhype. Tech writers have grown skeptical and even pessimistic that this may be yet another hype bubble ready to burst. Nevertheless, virtual reality support has seemed to become stagnate in the last few years, and the technology seems stuck in Early Adopter Neverland. Moreover, in 2017, stock investments in virtual reality grew by almost 80%! National Geographic even made a VR film in space. VR headsets were bundled with new phones and content producers, and educational platforms hurriedly created content. Sony invested millions in Playstation VR and re-platformed top-selling games solely for the release in 2016. In 2014, Facebook bought Oculus Rift for $2 billion. It seems not long ago that this was the tech buzzword of the last decade. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |