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| potato_hamster said: P.S. You know how the "whole thing about Sega VR and Virtual Boy is "just silly" because they couldn't do most of what VR headsets can do today? |
Even without taking specs into account like resolution per eye, field of view, processing power, number of colors, Hertz, lag...
Sega VR was just a concept that didn't make it to the market. We don't even know if the consumer version had the key features of a VR headset.
So let's go from this vaporware to the Virtual Boy: it wasn't a VR headset. It was missing a lot of key features of a VR headset:
It may look similar to a head-mounted display, but it is a stationary device with tabletop form factor. Instead of giving you some additional freedom to move your head around (like any HMD), you are even more constrained than looking on a TV or handheld screen. You have to hold your head absolutely still while looking through the goggles… not very comfortable.
You use it like a stationary tourism binocular:
There is no head-tracking at all. While any other VR system gives you 3DoF (3 degrees of freedom) or 6DoF (6 degrees of freedom) when you turn your head, the Virtual Boy only supports a fixed camera position in games (0DoF?).
You can’t even change the perspective with the controller, because the games weren’t using a 3D engine which allowed that. Without z-buffering, the 3D effect were some simple parallax tricks of 2D images… similar to the NES-classics on 3DS instead of the “real” 3DS games with a 3D-engine and proper management of image depth coordinates for a better stereoscopic effect.
It doesn’t try to put the player/user into a virtual world/scenario, you are only the observer from outside watching and controlling the protagonist.
Saying that the Virtual Boy is similar to a modern VR headset (or even the Forte VFX1 of the ‘90s) despite lacking a lot of features which are essential for a VR experience (and we are not talking about resolution) is like saying that PDAs (f.e. Apple Newton) were already smartphones because they had many of the smartphone features (while ignoring the lack of other essential features).
