Sony, Facebook, Google, Samsung, Apple, and Microsoft Now All Have a Hand In VR

An anonymous reader writes The Oculus Kickstarter breathed new life into consumer virtual reality when it raised more than $2.4 million just three years ago. Now, at the onset of 2015, some of the world's biggest tech companies have a vested interest in the growing consumer virtual reality industry. Road to VR takes a look back at VR in 2014 and the path that lead these tech giants to start taking it seriously.

Comments

Re:VR

[Alioth]

While I don't know whether "rebirth of VR" is hype or not I can say this.

Elite Dangerous through the Oculus Rift is mindblowing. VR that came before simply doesn't compare, it's like trying to compare a modern Lamborghini with a model T.

Almost, but not really

[s.petry]

I built 3 VR systems for a large defense contractor running SGI Infinite graphics. Later we added Linux (RH ES3) 5 node clusters, so you could say I built 6 labs. We had projectors and monitors that ran at 120 Hz even 20 years ago. It was rarely used except to test, because the human eye has difficulty seeing more than 60hz. "Optimal" display rate was 48 Hz per eye, which was 96Hz graphics rate if you used a single card (which was not an issue).

While motion tracking has improved due to the proliferation of cheap CPUs, there are still massive limitations simply due to practicality. I/O on a server that can process that many inbound channels is a biggie to overcome without a massive back plane.

The only difference between now and 20 years ago is that some people believe for "Entertainment" these systems will take off. It's counter intuitive if you know any history of VR in any other aspect (TVs, Movies, and Engineering), but they keep pushing. VR in work related extremely well to Human Factors Engineering, but had only "ooh ahh" value outside of this. I don't see "gaming"s implementation to be any different, limited payout for the investment.

As to the mobile devices with accelerometers they can only relate to a single point in VR. One object does not give anything meaningful in VR, and anyone that has worked with motion tracking should know that fact.