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potato_hamster on 21 August 2018
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Lafiel said:
potato_hamster said:

Just because there was much better VR headsets at the time doesn't mean that the Virtual Boy wasn't VR. At the time it was widely considered to be VR, and I cen remember reading many articles and magazines that said as much, and it still is considered "VR" by many today (and again, no one is saying it was good or even decent VR even for the time).

You don't make the rules about what constitutes "VR" and what doesn't.  The consensus amongst the gaming industry and media alike at the time, both before and after its demise, called it a "VR system". I don't see any reason to change that just because 20 years later, modern VR solutions blow it out of the water in every way imaginable.

Let me put it to you this way: Imagine in 15 years time, someone looked back on the GTX 1050 graphics card and said "That wasn't a real graphics card. It didn't do real time ray tracing,  it didn't play AAA games at the time in 4K at ultra settings,it doesn't do (insert 15 years of advancement here), and look there were better graphics processing solutions at the time that did real time ray tracing, 4K, and other things the 1050 didn't do! It has the same feature set in common with this more modern APU. nVidia marketed it as a graphics card but it never was. The GTX is simply put a "weird looking" APU!" They would be laughed at. Because it's horseshit.

Your example doesn't hold any water. Graphics cards have been on the market for more than 20 years, there are already hundreds of millions of them in homes worldwide, their function is well defined and at no point in the near future (next 100+ years) will a 1050 be not called a graphics card - it's literally a card you put into the PC to be able to display graphics. A much better example in the future will be the use of "lighting" in game graphics/graphics discussions.

Nintendo used "Virtual Reality" as a buzz word to market the Virtual Boy and was able to do so with hardly anybody rejecting that is because: 1. hardly anybody had been able to try (let alone having in-depth sessions exploring the possibilities and limitations of) existing VR headsets, as in 1995 there were only a few thousend in use around the world and probably only a few hundred in public spaces or otherwise accessable to video game magazine writers - and not all of the writers had access to a VB either  2. video game magazines weren't in any way critical about the hardware or it's functions, expertise in these things was extremely limited in "the media" and specs were simply copied wholesale from PR without any commentary ("64bit Atari Jaguar" anyone?)  - the "consensus" you speak of was formed by Nintendo PR, not by an in-depth discussion by industry/technology experts weighing in about how VB differentiates itself to the already well known concept of stereoscopic 3D (mostly realized through anaglyph at the time though) and lives up to the lofty promise of "virtual reality".

 

While stereoscopic 3D is an essential part of Virtual Reality, it alone simply isn't VR and saying "back then VR was vague enough to call S3D VR and get away with it in a space that was basically technology analphabets having fun with technology, so we have to accept that for all eternity" is not a convincing argument.


My example is fine. The way Virtual Reality systems were defined when the Virtual Boy came out meant that at the time it was widely considered to be one. You even admit that. It doesn't really matter why it was considered a VR system. It doesn't change the fact that it was. Just because the bar has been raised since then that devices with similar feature sets are not considered to be VR today doesn't mean that the Virtual Boy wasn't a VR system. If you made a similar device today it almost certainly wouldn't be, but at the same time, when the Virtual Boy was released, it was.

"Virtual Reality" is STILL a buzz word. Do you know there's people that do not consider any VR system that doesn't completely hijack your senses (think Matrix style) to NOT be "real VR"? To this day Virtual Reality's definition is still evolving as technological boundaries push the boundaries of what's actually possible.  Who knows, perhaps in 100 years we will have the ability to hijack our senses and people on message boards will be whinging "The PSVR wasn't really VR! Sony just used "Virtual Reality" to market the PSVR because there wasn't people like me around telling them they're wrong!"

Jim Sterling would have a field day with your comment.