Whatever happened to VR?

[willofgod]

An arcade near where I work (bottom of the Lickey Hills) once had some big VR gaming machines in. They were really basic games, and at a quid a go very expensive.

But I'll tell you what they were reet boo! I had a go on all of them and it was loads of fun. Basically you'd stand in this little arena thing a the operator would attach a thing around your waist so the machine could gaugh your sideways movements. And also a massive helmet thing on your head with little tellys in it so you could see what was going on. A friend would be in a similar pod, and both of you got a hand held gun thing.

So into the game you go. The environment was very basic, no textures just blocky polygons coloured in and wireframe. It was also a tad laggy responding to your movements. You turn your head, and the view changed to view that direction. Hold up your hand, and up comes you hand in the game with a gun in it. Aim the gun, the arm flexes and aims right where your pointing in the game! Twist around and you turn in that direction! Press another button on the hand held and off you go in the direction your body is facing.

The idea was very simple, move around the little maze, find your mate and shoot him. Very simple and primitive, but do you know what, it was fucking well cool!

I absolutely loved it, and I cant believe it disappeared completely because this was about 10 years ago now. Whatever happened to VR? I'd have thought at the time that we'd all have VR headsets for our PCs, and would be playing COD like we were really there. But no... bugger all developments, and what we had has gone... Pity, I thought it was great!

Anyone else play on one of those machines?



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[r1ncewind]

i remember they brought out the headset with a glove that had pressure pads that made it feel like you were holding something.
and then all of a sudden dvd and laserdisk came charging through the technology barrier and sadly VR got left out i think because people were scared of it. :(

all this was happening when that film THE LAWNMOWER MAN came out, and i think it put people off a bit.

[russellg81]

l remember they had it at my megabowl for a couple of months no one really played it to be honest it was to expensive

l never tryed it because it was either spending £1-£2 for one shot or go show off playing as ryu for SF2 or playing mortal kombat as sub-zero

but in 1993 there was a cool show hosted by Craig Charles from Red Dwarf the show was called Cyberzone
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where 2 teams who used VR machines to play each other one team had to complete some mission and the other team had to stop them if l remember right

heres some info about the show

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info about the machines used for the show

The computers used were a network of 486 PCs, each with an astounding 8Mb of memory - the most tasty machine you could by at the time. The VR software was an early version of Superscape - which had previously been used for another Broadsword production, The Satellite Game.

anyway we all know Gamesmaster was the best computer games show on TV even if the host was a Tim