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A man who invented VR goggles 50 years too soon (2016)
41–50 of 121 posts
Re: A man who invented VR goggles 50 years too soon (2016)
#42I 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.
I worked on a tablet computer ca. '99. We were not first, nor did we have any illusions we were. There were novel parts about our business plan, but a tablet was "obvious".
But it's an illustration of what you describe: When the iPhone and later iPad were launched, a lot of people thought they were new.
Even though there had been a whole fad of touch devices in phone and tablet form that had come and gone before the iPhone came.
A lot of us dismissed them at first because we'd seen that fad come and go, without realising that the genius of Apple with respect to those devices was not in the technical innovation, but in recognising when enough percent-point improvements had been made to unlock something that'd actually appeal to the general public.
"Our" tablet was tethered to a custom DECT base station (wifi wasn't widespread yet), had about 2 hours of battery. The resistive touch was awful, the screen resolution was small, and I had to cram Linux and the GUI, with space left over for a port of Opera, in to 16MB of flash and 16MB RAM in the original prototype...
In retrospect it had no chance in hell. But to a geek like me it was amazingly cool.
Other tablets and pda's with or without network and phone of that era were either attempts at slimming down laptops (e.g. I had a laptop with a touch screen on a swivel back then) that were still way too big, or they were devices like ours, with all sorts of limitations that geeks were fine with, and regular people weren't.
So when these devices disappeared one after the other, many of us dismissed the concept as a whole as tried and failed, rather than realise that the problem was one of enough percent-point improvements and not the concept.
And for all of the many issues I have with Apple, while they were not first, they still deserve plenty of credit for simply being smart enough to recognise when the time was right for this category of devices. Because a whole lot of companies got that timing extremely wrong.
Re: A man who invented VR goggles 50 years too soon (2016)
#43This feels very relevent:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AcQifPHcMLE
It's not really VR, or is it? It's a model.
Re: A man who invented VR goggles 50 years too soon (2016)
#44Here is the real deal: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Sword_of_Damocles_(virtual...
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Re: A man who invented VR goggles 50 years too soon (2016)
#45I 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.
I worked on a tablet computer ca. '99. We were not first, nor did we have any illusions we were. There were novel parts about our business plan, but a tablet was "obvious". But it's an illustration of what you describe: When the iPhone and later iPad were launched, a lot of people thought they were new. Even though there had been a whole fad of touch devices in phone and tablet form that had come and gone before the…
I remember the UMPC! That was a whole category of portable computers that didn't stand the test of time. Apple got a lot of things right, but I think it was less about timing and more about being usable, and affordable by the masses. Blackberry was great but it cost too much and didn't have a big enough battery.
Re: A man who invented VR goggles 50 years too soon (2016)
#46Earlier quoted context omitted.
Most kids had cell phones in mid late nineties where I lived, the phones themselves were cheap but using them were not very cheap, but giving a kid a phone so you could call them if the parent needed seemed popular.
According to [1] (which might be incomplete, IDK) cell phone sales went from 100 million per year in 1997 to 400 million per year in 2000. Subsequently, sales rose to 1.5 billion per year. So when talking about how many people have cell phones, the difference between "mid 90s" and "late 90s" makes a big difference :) [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_best-selling_mobile_ph...
Indeed, in Norway for example, the tipping point was ~1995: Suddenly the competition had heated up enough that there were "free" phones with contract, and "everyone" got one - in absolute numbers they were still not everywhere, but the rate of increase was dramatic, and you'd go from not knowing anyone with a cellphone (me in '94 - literally zero people) to a large number having one by the summer of '95.
Other countries will have different specific times when this happened, but my impression is that cell phones largely took off in a lot of countries in the same way, because competition and high prices for spectrum meant the large telcos suddenly had a reason to poor vast amounts of cash into pushing cellphones almost "overnight", and suddenly even if you didn't have one yourself you'd at least know enough people that it wasn't anything unusual any more.
I'm 48. While I've seen many technical changes, and been part of e.g. driving internet adoption (the company I worked at in '95 was an internet service provide I co-founded, and triggered a price war on internet access in Norway with, that we soundly lost but at least it helped significantly change the market), but none of those changes - including the internet adoption - had such extremely rapid, very visible, effect on society in such a short period of time
(I think pervasive internet access has probably made a bigger difference in the long run, but of course part of that was also enabled by cellphones, but it took longer for it to shape things as visibly)
Re: A man who invented VR goggles 50 years too soon (2016)
#47I 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.
I worked on a tablet computer ca. '99. We were not first, nor did we have any illusions we were. There were novel parts about our business plan, but a tablet was "obvious". But it's an illustration of what you describe: When the iPhone and later iPad were launched, a lot of people thought they were new. Even though there had been a whole fad of touch devices in phone and tablet form that had come and gone before the…
I'll never forget the crowd going bananas when Steve Jobs showed that you could scroll on the iPhone by just dragging the list with a finger, or zoom a map/website with two fingers.
Smartphones weren't new, but one where you didn't have to rely on buttons or an input pen on a terrible resistive touchscreen on the other hand was a big improvement. I still miss phones with qwerty keyboards but not the UIs before the iPhone.
Re: A man who invented VR goggles 50 years too soon (2016)
#48These 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 th…
You can use VR goggles to display static 2D images, and they would still be VR googles though. It's actually a bit disappointing how close he was with his mockup to modern VR goggles (which are still a bulky contraption wrapped around your head).
It's actually a bit disappointing how an art project by a dilettante is promoted over previous work by others, and praised as an early version of VR when Gersbeck meant it as a portable personal stereoscopic TV receiving shows from a broadcast station.
Here's pre-1963 work mentioned in a patent application at https://patents.google.com/patent/US20180224936A1/en?q=(Tele...
> Morton Heilig's next commercial offering was the Telesphere Mask (patented 1960) and was the first example of a head-mounted display (HMD), albeit for a non-interactive film medium without any motion tracking. The headset provided stereoscopic 3D and wide vision with stereo sound.
> In 1961, two Philco Corporation engineers (Comeau & Bryan) developed the first precursor to the HMD as we know it today—the Headsight. It incorporated an independent video screen for each eye and a magnetic motion tracking system, which was linked to a closed circuit camera. The Headsight was not actually developed for virtual reality applications (the term didn't exist then), but to allow for immersive remote viewing of dangerous situations by the military. Head movements would move a remote camera, allowing the user to naturally look around the environment. Headsight was the first step in the evolution of the VR head mounted display but it lacked the integration of computer and image generation.
Here's Heilig's patent for "Stereoscopic-television apparatus for individual use" https://patents.google.com/patent/US2955156A/en?q=(Morton)&i... , filed in 1957 and granted in 1960. Not only was it a head-mounted display, but it included air tubes so the wearer could feel a breeze, and optionally smell scents.
Headsight was on the cover of the magazine "Electronics" in 1961, https://archive.org/details/sim_electronics_1961-11-10_34_45... , and the article shows it actually worked, and was not a mockup.
Re: A man who invented VR goggles 50 years too soon (2016)
#49Earlier quoted context omitted.
I worked on a tablet computer ca. '99. We were not first, nor did we have any illusions we were. There were novel parts about our business plan, but a tablet was "obvious". But it's an illustration of what you describe: When the iPhone and later iPad were launched, a lot of people thought they were new. Even though there had been a whole fad of touch devices in phone and tablet form that had come and gone before the…
I remember the UMPC! That was a whole category of portable computers that didn't stand the test of time. Apple got a lot of things right, but I think it was less about timing and more about being usable, and affordable by the masses. Blackberry was great but it cost too much and didn't have a big enough battery.
Being usable was largely about timing, though.
None of the choices that compromised our device - or those of most of our competitors - were choices we made because we thought they were right, or best, but because we were forced to by timing and what was available at what cost, and failed to realize that the result was too compromised to stand a chance.
Put another way: Had Apple launched an iPad in 2000, it would've had exactly the same hardware usability issues. There were no good, cheap enough touch screens, or displays, or cheap enough RAM, or cheap enough flash, to deliver what they did later at that time at any price, much less affordable enough.
Timing it when the available components were good enough and cheap enough was how they got it usable and affordable.
Trying too early and drawing the wrong conclusions was also why a lot of their competitors had moved onto a very different track in terms of design.
If you e.g. look at Palm devices that started to get network connectivity etc., from ~2000, you'll see the grid of (user-installable) apps w/touch and no keyboard, and Blackberry-like devices w/keyboard "won" for a while because people took users rejection of crappy, limited resistive touch as a rejection of touch. (I walked around with a Palm device for several years from '98 or so, and couldn't understand why "normal people" rejected them - it felt like scifi)
[EDIT: UMPC was from 2006; and not the type of devices I'm talking about - they're a couple of generations of hardware later; the UMPC if anything were part of that bastardization of the earlier touch focused devices as manufacturers declared the "cleaner" devices dead and buried in the market place without understanding why]
Re: A man who invented VR goggles 50 years too soon (2016)
#50These 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 th…
You can use VR goggles to display static 2D images, and they would still be VR googles though. It's actually a bit disappointing how close he was with his mockup to modern VR goggles (which are still a bulky contraption wrapped around your head).
Using VR goggles that have no capability of viewing anything VR makes them just regular goggles though?
This tank simulator from the 1970s is a great example of early VR: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AcQifPHcMLE I wonder if there's anything earlier..