
The Rise and Fall and Rise of Virtual Reality - Impossible
http://www.theverge.com/a/virtual-reality
======
angersock
They don't mention _Snow Crash_ , which makes me really sad. eXistenZ is,
though, so I suppose that's something. :(

~~~
fit2rule
It was 1993, late .. I was in the Embarcadero, something like the 36th floor,
to play some Spectre VR at Velocity/Peninsula, where the game was made. My pal
who worked there had been working late, so we blew some millions of tank
pixels way. It was bliss. Doom had hit too, so we spent a few hours at that,
and then back to Spectre VR again. Testing his networking code. By the time we
walked out satisfied it was working, it was Saturday morning, and the sun was
up in San Francisco. As we left his office, he gave me "Snow Crash" to take
with me, for it was company reading and he'd read it already. It was
motivating.

On the ground level of Embarcadero, as we left to trudge into our bunks across
the bay, there was one of the first headset-VR shop/setups, running .. I think
.. 'Dino'. It made me puke if I played for a few minutes, but it was neat that
'VR', back then, 'was coming .. soon'.

A few years later, there were the flight-sim centers around the SGI
neighborhood. HUD's of pixels, or something.

Anyway, I still like to read Snow Crash every few years or so. Next month I'll
probably do a workshop with some Dutch friends in Den Haag, with their new
Occulus Rift headsets.. so to this old grizzly, it seems people want VR, even
still. Gotta solve the puke factor, at least in my case, first though ..

~~~
vitamen
I've read Snow Crash yearly since I discovered the book some 14 years ago. I
guess that's how I deal with the fact that Stephenson often doesn't know how
to end a novel. I ached for a VR world like the Metaverse for a long time back
then, but of course everything has always fallen well short of the mark. Maybe
World of Warcraft came closest for me, to the degree I became immersed in
Azeroth, but it was still obviously not the dream.

~~~
dredmorbius
He _has_ gotten better at endings. Both _Anathem_ and _Reamde_ did wrap up
(though they also leave open the option for sequels or prequels).

------
bane
Here's a better article on this whole thing that I've kept bookmarked since I
saw I first saw it.

[http://assayviaessay.blogspot.com/2014/03/virtual-spaces-
rea...](http://assayviaessay.blogspot.com/2014/03/virtual-spaces-real-
data.html)

~~~
dredmorbius
Oddly, both VR essays utterly fail to load or render w/o JS active.

------
polarix
Anyone want to compile a plain text version of this?

~~~
sp332
If you block voxmedia.com this page loads as a wall of text. Here's a copy
[https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?strip=1&q=cach...](https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?strip=1&q=cache:http%3A%2F%2Fwww.theverge.com%2Fa%2Fvirtual-
reality)

~~~
scholia
Thanks. More than 27,000 words....

------
higherpurpose
They forgot to add "Sponsored post".

~~~
osrius
yeah, its not like that feature covers the occulus rift, the sony morpheus,
and if they'll even succeed at all.

great sponsorship.

------
peter303
works poorly in firefox

------
hyp0
maybe VR is real this time, but I've seen nothing but hype.

though Carmack promotes it, his in-depth technical reports convinced me we're
a tremendously long way off. it might be OK for particular orientations and
movement directions.

~~~
atom-morgan
Have you watched any of the reaction videos on YouTube? I don't think we've
seen anything like this with VR before.

~~~
chucknelson
Agreed. Combine that with the Oculus DK2 getting almost universal acclaim from
users, with a very small subset of software thus far that supports the new SDK
and positional tracking, and this seems like it'll be a very big deal.

