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). |
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.