The tech industry\u2019s \u201cVR is really going to happen\u201d push comes around roughly once a decade. And while this generation\u2019s devices\u2014the Meta Quest, Apple Vision Pro, etc\u2014are certainly the most technologically advanced yet, you might be surprised by the results that previous attempts at VR were able to achieve.<\/p>\n
Take, for example, the Virtual Boy, a disastrous Nintendo console released in 1995. You might wonder how on earth 1995 technology managed to create any sort of illusion of VR. Well, in a fascinating video<\/a>, Gavin Free\u2014one half of YouTube veterans the Slo-Mo Guys\u2014looks at how the Virtual Boy worked, and it turns out that the technology was genuinely ingenious.<\/p>\n If you\u2019re only familiar with modern-era headsets, you might have trouble even recognizing the Virtual Boy as a VR device. For a start, it\u2019s not a headset; instead, it\u2019s a table-mounted device into which you peered in the same way that you might look into a kaleidoscope or a View-Master<\/a>.<\/p>\n The difference between today\u2019s approach to VR and that used in 1995 goes further than aesthetics and ergonomics, too. Instead of trying to render and display a full-blown 3D environment, which is a task that even today\u2019s headsets find to be a struggle, the Virtual Boy did something extremely clever: it let the viewer\u2019s eyes and brain do most of the work.<\/p>\n The magic starts with the Virtual Boy\u2019s two displays\u2014one for each eye\u2014which had a resolution of 1 x 224. No, that wasn\u2019t a typo\u2014each display really is precisely one pixel wide. They\u2019re also very small, only about 0.4 inches high, with two large lenses magnifying their output for the viewer to see. Each of the displays sits perpendicular to the front of the device; their output is redirected toward the viewer by two mirrors, each of which sits at an angle of about 45\u00b0 to the display.<\/p>\n I say \u201cabout 45\u00b0\u201d because the key point here is that the mirrors move. They move very fast, in fact, oscillating 50 times a second. As they move, it appears to the viewer that the column of pixels is panning back and forth across their field of vision. The effect is like watching an old cathode ray TV, where the image you see is created by an electron gun scanning back and forth rapidly as it fires a beam of electrons at the screen.<\/p>\n The use of two separate displays also allowed the Virtual Boy to create the illusion of a 3D image. It did so in a similar way to today\u2019s headsets, which is by showing the image to each eye from a slightly different perspective.<\/p>\n There were limitations, of course. As the displays use only red LEDs, the image is monochrome, which no doubt saved on processing power. However, Free also points out that to display full color, the Virtual Boy would have required blue LEDs, which are actually a relatively recent technology. (The story of the blue LED is a fascinating subject<\/a> in and of itself.)<\/p>\n Anyway, despite its ingenuity, the Virtual Boy was a commercial failure\u2014reviewers complained about eye strain and dizziness, and it was discontinued only a year after its release, and only 22 titles were ever released for it. It seems the world wasn\u2019t ready for VR in 1995, either.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The tech industry\u2019s \u201cVR is really going to happen\u201d push comes around roughly once a decade. 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