Virtual Reality

Recently, stories of virtual reality headsets have been popping up in the news as many companies are trying to catch on to the craze that has possibly triggered the future of entertainment.

Virtual reality has been up in the market recently and there are a lot of companies creating their own variant of the virtual reality entertainment system. However, this is not the first time that virtual reality has been attempted to be sold in the market; the earliest version of virtual reality consoles in the market can be traced back to 1995 where Nintendo announced the release of the Virtual Boy. The Virtual Boy was the first official stab at retailing a virtual reality console. Due to its clunky design and heavy price tag, as well as the fact that it was not a great piece of technology, is shortly fail, lasting less than a year in Japan and North America, as well as not even being released in Europe. This piece of tech was well before its time, but was a milestone that has set the tone for current virtual reality technology?

In August 2012, a small company in the name of “Oculus Rift” released a Dev kit version of a prototype that they had been working with off the back of a Kick-starter Campaign. This was a popular campaign as in some reports it is said to have sold 4-5 units a minute for the first day. This was the start of the new VR Headsets; Oculus had a lot of media attention and a lot of promotion on YouTube from popular YouTubers, which in turn managed to get itself an offer from Facebook in the region of $400 million in cash, $1.6 billion in Facebook stock, and an additional $300 million subject to Oculus VR meeting certain financial targets in a transaction expected to close in the second quarter of 2014, which they accepted. This was a massive move in the market for virtual reality, as it received great public reception as well as the fact that the equipment was a huge improvement over any virtual reality equipment out there already. With all of this promotion, Oculus VR were able to release a second Dev kit as well as a consumer version that outsold many expectations. Now with all this money being put into research and improving its capabilities, Oculus VR are now powering the next step in virtual reality in the form of, not-to-pricey, smartphone peripherals; Oculus has paired up with Samsung in the bid to create a really affordable peripherals for their new set of phones. This could a bid to make VR equipment a lot more popular in and around the home, more mainstream if you like.

But, it was not long until other businesses were to latch onto the VR idea, Sony quickly announced their prototype version of their attempt at a VR headset; “Project Morpheus”. This was to be functional with Sony’s other products such as the PS4 and PlayStation Vita. It features a high FOV, 6DOF head-tracking, stereoscopic 3D, and unwarped output to a TV for others to view what the user sees. This is truly a strong attempt at confronting Oculus in the VR market and a promising one at that. So is this the start of a virtual reality take-over, I certainly hope so, we’ll just have to see when all VR items have been released. 

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