A man who invented VR goggles 50 years too soon (2016)
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A man who invented VR goggles 50 years too soon (2016)
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Re: A man who invented VR goggles 50 years too soon (2016)
#2it's like cellphones. Took decades until the flip phone and then iPhone. But I think it's still too early to say VR is mainstream. It is still a niche.
Re: A man who invented VR goggles 50 years too soon (2016)
#3I’ve frequently compared modern VR headsets with cell phones of the 1980s. Big, bulky pieces of metal and glass that will one day look comical. Meanwhile this guy invents VR of the 1960s!
Re: A man who invented VR goggles 50 years too soon (2016)
#4I’ve frequently compared modern VR headsets with cell phones of the 1980s. Big, bulky pieces of metal and glass that will one day look comical. Meanwhile this guy invents VR of the 1960s!
I feel like the Quest could be very light if they took the Apple approach and moved the battery and computer to a pocket box. Even before any of these headsets existed I imagined most of them being that way.
Re: A man who invented VR goggles 50 years too soon (2016)
#5I wish more people knew/appreciated the incrementalism of progress.
A huge amount of constant "boring" percent-point improvement work or price-shifts are required to unlock the interesting changes, and often the people and companies associated with those new discoveries and ways of doing things are not really the first at all, but rather the lucky or the ruthless.
Re: A man who invented VR goggles 50 years too soon (2016)
#6I’ve frequently compared modern VR headsets with cell phones of the 1980s. Big, bulky pieces of metal and glass that will one day look comical. Meanwhile this guy invents VR of the 1960s!
I feel like the Quest could be very light if they took the Apple approach and moved the battery and computer to a pocket box. Even before any of these headsets existed I imagined most of them being that way.
That would need quite the cable to support 6 camera video feeds, 2 display video feeds, 2 audio feeds, and some other control data in addition to power.
Re: A man who invented VR goggles 50 years too soon (2016)
#71963+50 = 2013. Give VR google adoption rate and 10% of weekly user among those who own them, I'd say he was more than 70 years too soon at least.
Re: A man who invented VR goggles 50 years too soon (2016)
#8I have a story like this.
My first job out of engineering school was working for Dr. Robert Jarvik, of artificial heart fame.
He has a patent where there is a drawing of a person, on a treadmill, with cables tied to each joint. The idea is it's a virtual reality exercise setup. A Nintendo wii or kinect before sensors were any good.
https://patents.google.com/patent/US5577981A/en?q=(exercise)...
Re: A man who invented VR goggles 50 years too soon (2016)
#9These had nothing to do with VR. It was only allegedly able to be used for showing steroscopic video, like a stereoscope. It was not capable of showing a virtual reality to the user where they were present in it. It's hard to find any actual information about this device as the articles that refer to this don't cite their sources and probably just copied the information off of each other. There is no evidence that this actually worked and there is no mention of using lenses to make it possible to focus on the displays and then claim that it worked using small batteries leaves me skepticle. Not to even mention the weight this would be. I would be fairly confident to say this mock up was nonfunctional and was just an art project.
Edit: The source is page 79 of this life magazine https://archive.org/details/LifeV55n0419630726 Reading this makes it clear this was purely a mockup of an idea he had and not a functional device.
>Sex has not distracted him in the slightest, however, from his lifelong interest in electronic gadgetry and in the new horizons being opened by the advance of more orthodox scientific knowledge. Neither has it inhibited his bent for invention on those occasions when he feels that duty and circumstance demand it —although he now invents only in broad outline, leaving the actual mechanics of the thing to others. His television eyeglasses —a device for which he feels millions yearn— constitute a ease in point
>When the idea for this handy, pocket-size portable TV set occurred to him in 1936, he was forced to dismiss it as impractical. But a few weeks ago, feeling that the electronics industry was catching up with his New Deal-era concepts, he ordered some of his employees to build a mock-up.
>"It is now perfectly possible to make thin, inch-square cathode lubes," he says, and to run them with low-voltage current from very small batteries with no danger at all of electrocuting the wearer. Sound can carried to the ear just as in a hearing aid. Television eyeglasses should weigh only about five ounces. Since there will be a picture for each eye, the glasses will make a stereoptical view possible and since they will be masked —like goggles— they can be used in bright sunlight. The user can take them out of his pocket anywhere, slip them on, flip a switch and turn to his favorite station." A V-type aerial protrudes from the top of Gernsback’s mock-up of the TV glasses. He likes the effect which can only he described as neo-Martian.
Re: A man who invented VR goggles 50 years too soon (2016)
#101963+50 = 2013. Give VR google adoption rate and 10% of weekly user among those who own them, I'd say he was more than 70 years too soon at least.
you're not far off the mark
> This article appears in the December 2016 print issue as “Before Virtual Reality Was Cool.”