Questions for Dissertation

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1

Hello

I am currently writing a dissertation and the subject I have chosen is the world of Virtual and augmented reality (VR and AR), I felt it was a very good choice as all these new devices as well as pokemon go, it should be able to give me ample things to write and discuss for said piece.

I was hoping that you could answer some questions for me to include in my research.
I will try and ask questions in a point by point basis so it makes things easier for you however you can answer in any way that you would like.

History

  1. As you probably know, Virtual and augmented reality (VR and AR) have been tried before the current generations, the main devices that I would like to talk about are the Power Glove and the Virtual boy. These devices came during an era where there was a large audience that was looking for advanced emersive technology like this and these units should have been the answer to their prayers. However these units were a commercial failure.

my question is, What do you think made this units fail as badly as they did?
and secondly, do you think there was anything that could have made these devices succeed?

Current/Future

  1. VR and AR have started a new life and look like they are gaining a lot of backing from big companies, however it has been shown in the past that a solid backing doesn’t mean success.
    some critics feel that in a combination of Augmented and Virtual reality can help pave the way for the future.

my question is, can you see this new age of reality based gaming getting any traction and in what way?
secondly can you see it changing the way we play video games?

I hope that you will be able to answer my questions and I look forward to hearing from you.

2

On the history–those things failed because they didn’t work well, using the virtual boy made people sick and the experience was bad. The reason for VR right now is that the smartphone market has created reasonably priced hardware that VR uses–high resolution screens, motion sensors, and small high powered processors.

On the future, it will get traction as technology improves and the price goes down. The goal for the future is to have some kind of glasses that you could wear that gives a good AR experience but isn’t huge and ugly. The more promising technology is from Magic Leap, but we don’t know enough about their technology yet. AR already works to some degree so it’s really only limited by the processing power. For VR it’s a bit different, the biggest issue with VR is that you can’t move around like you would want to in a video game, you can’t run around because you’ll run into your wall. And there’s no way around that outside of something like The Matrix where it would send the signals directly to your brain, and that’s a problematic solution that wouldn’t happen for a very long time. Until then, creators will have to make high quality games for it, but ultimately what works best will be things that work better in VR than they do in another form and we haven’t quite gotten there yet.