Conina said:
The Virtual Boy was (despite its name) no VR headset, it was a different kind of head-mounted display! It was missing the essential feature of motion sensors, so you can look around in a virtual world by head movements. Without this motion input, it was just a bad monochrome monitor with very low resolution, low contrast (red & black... really?) and low FOV strapped to your head. SEGA's VR glasses weren't a "viable consumer VR device" either: it remained only a prototype, and was never released to the general public. Then CEO Tom Kalinske stated that the system was not released due to it inducing motion sickness and severe headaches in users. The most promising commercial VR headset in the 1990s was the Forte VFX1, but it still had much more issues than benefits and died with MS-DOS. You make it sound that there were viable consumer VR devices available after the 1990s all the time and that the Oculus Rift/Vive/PSVR were nothing special at all. So which consumer VR headsets were the best and second best in 2000 - 2004? Which consumer VR headsets were the best and second best in 2005 - 2009? Which consumer VR headsets were the best and second best in 2010 - 2014? |
Okay, so if you know all of the consumer level VR headsets in the past, and pretend they didn't count for a variety of arbitrary reasons, then this new series are the first.
Makes sense.
Manufacturers stopped trying to make VR headsets for the masses for years because they always sold horrifically bad and weren't great experiences. Did that ever happen with cars, or tvs or smartphones? No? Hmm.... I wonder why. Just because this new grouping is better doesn't mean we can just discount the past and pretend it never happened. We don't say that the first real commercially viable television were HD LCD panels because they were *so much better* than the CRT TVs before them. We don't say the Tesla Model X was the first real commercially viable SUV because it was the first one to get a five star safety rating in every category and had so many features that mass-market SUVs never had in the past? We don't say the iPhone was the first commercially viable smartphone because it was *so much better* than the ones that came before it. But in VR? Let's ignore the decades of failed VR headsets. Let's pretend VR *really started* with the Oculus Rift.
Sorry. That's a fairy tale you tell yourself to make VR sound like it's more than the niche product than it's always ever been. Need I remind you that the Virtual Boy actually sold at a higher rate than the HTC Vive and Oculus Rift before Nintendo canned it?
So let me ask you this. Let's say the PSVR2 launches with the PS5. It costs $250. It has dual 4K screens, and a much better viewing angle. All games run at 120Hz. The screendoor effect is practically non-existent. Will that device be "ready for mainstream" and if so, assuming the PS5 sells as well as the PS4, how much should we expect the PSVR2 to sell over its lifetime? Or will you just shift the goalposts and pretend that the PSVR2 is the "first viable consumer VR device" and start all of this nonsense again?
