Despite decades of hype, virtual reality has never been quite ready for prime time. That is about to change, with implications for industries from gaming to engineering. Matthew Partridge reports
It’s match point and I’m serving. I throw the ball up in the air and swing my paddle. The ball hits the table, then flies just above the net. My opponent manages to get to it, but his return is just a little too high and I smash it. Game set and match to me. The game is taking place on top of a mountain and my opponent, who appears as a pair of hands, with a cat’s face but no body, lives thousands of miles away. I haven’t left my kitchen. Welcome to the new world of mainstream virtual reality – a world now backed by two of the world’s most powerful technology companies.
Beyond the false dawns
Virtual reality (VR) isn’t new. Even before people were playing Pong on the Atari game console in the 1970s, researchers at MIT had developed an early form of virtual reality called the “Sword of Damocles”, says Alastair Unwin of the Polar Capital Technology Trust. But although there have been attempts to master VR for a long time, “it has always been a big problem to render an experience that doesn’t make you dizzy or cause eyestrain”. It doesn’t help that putting on the kit, whether it’s a headset or some kind of visor, makes you look “just a bit bizarre”.
The industry has suffered several “false dawns”. In 2013 Google developed a technology that projected information from a computer onto a pair of glasses, with the idea that the wearer would be able to surf the internet by voice command alone. A few years later another technology company came up with the “Magic Leap”, a pair of goggles that made similar promises. Both devices flopped, but Unwin thinks that this time is different. VR has “now moved on from its heavily hyped days” and is “starting to find productive uses”, attracting serious investment from major companies.
Steve Caruso of software developer Ustwo agrees. The real problem with earlier incarnations was that VR headsets were limited by the need for a physical connection to a high-performance gaming or workstation PC. This meant that users had to spend thousands of pounds on the latest machines, then go through an “onerous set-up” process, sometimes involving placing tracking hardware around their rooms. Even after all that they we
