I think you're a little too quick to brush off the complaints of depression after watching Avatar in 3D as coming from people who are "fairly weak". It's telling that the claims seem to be that people were depressed because they were being kept away from the Avatar world implying that they found their own lives comparitively dull. There is a modern epidemic of depression and it's not unreasonable to hypothesise that it is related to media consumption. This hypothesis should of course be tested before it is taken as fact and I'm not aware of the work that has gone into this. It also seems reasonable to assume that increasing the level of immersion would increase the intensity of the depressing effect, should it be real.

Such issues should be studied empirically rather than immediately dismissed as known quantities according to your own predisposition. Non-gamers often wrongly get into a moral frenzy about violence in gaming but on the other hand gamers often dismiss any negative impacts of their hobby compared to time spent playing games as sport and "normal" physical socialising. I love playing games, but I recognise that in some respects they have probably damaged me (while improving me in other ways) compared to time spent in activities I am more evolved for.

Also, what about eyesight? You are essentially looking at two screens right in front of your eyes. Is this damaging for long periods? Or are the images designed to fool your eyes into focusing at a greater distance (I assume this happens). But that suggests the system is choosing your focus for you, which may lead to it's own problems. I can't get my head around how this might work but I would definitely like to try it!

Andrew-

I am a little too young to have been involved in the games industry when Namco and SEGA were flirting with this technology. I'd be interested to hear their thoughts now that it is a more achievable goal.

Prash-
Apologies if I offended anyone with my little joke. I may have been influenced by the news reports I saw on the TV which were all reporting on it in a mocking manner. The main point I was making is that better immersion CAN have a deeper impact on people, hence citing this as an example. This would certainly raise even more concerns about violence in games, something I had not previously thought about.

As for eyesight, I'd put that into the eyestrain category. We may need to do some further studies into the long term effects of using virtual reality headsets.

I remember playing Dactyl Nightmare back when I was a kid in the early 90's. I remember having fun, but also walking away a little disappointed that the picture didn't fill my entire field of vision.

So is there a headset that actually fills your ENTIRE FIELD OF VISION? I've never used or heard of a headset that does more than project a square image in front of your face. I don't want to feel like I'm looking at a square surrounded by blackness - I want to feel like I'm in a whole new world. Does this exist?

From the times I've tried VR systems (both the headsets, and the Battletech pods) I've been pretty impressed with the experience. I think the former barriers to flow establishment were primarily graphical in nature. That is far less of an issue now and I really think that if Avatar did anything it proved that 3D can be used in a way that doesn't show off the 3D (the worst offender here in my opinion is JAWS 3D) but assumes it as part of the environment.

I would say that the key to widespread acceptance of 3D is not to try to relaunch the Virtual Boy, but to use 3D display technology with polarized glasses in combination with head tracking to approximate immersion. The issue with VR and motion sickness is that of all of our senses which normally track our body position the only ones that are addressed by traditional VR headsets are vision and hearing. When the messages our eyes and ears receive don't match those which we're receiving from our inner ear (balance) or our skin (touch/warmth/etc) it is unsettling. If we readjust the idea of VR from full emersion, to "just enough emersion to immerse the player" a lot of those issues get addressed. It's the difference between a Battletech style mech pod or a full cockpit flight sim and a VR headset.

These days curved wrap around HMD's exist but they are nearly $100,000. A friend and I developed a VR flight sim back in 2006 and researched the possibilities beyond stereoscopic eye pieces that only amounted to a box with the 3D look and no peripheral vision. Overall, I'm more excited by polarized 3D glasses than giant VR HMD's. It was fun at the time though.

I was at W.Industries which became Virtuality PLC in the 90's. The days of Dactyl Nightmare!
That was back when we produced both the stand up and sit down VR units based around Amigas, and were using Polhemus trackers for following hand and head movements. Our units were in use all over the world in theme parks and specialist centres. The idea at the time was that this was the future of arcades and more....

I remember us advising on Lawnmower Man, and working with people like Douglas Adams and the Star Trek franchises. Theme parks for the latter one if I remember correctly. I always wanted to try and wrangle that one in some way so as to get an invite to meet Bill - but never did. Shame.

As we were transitioning to PCs myself and another engineer got involved with a project we were doing under contract for Sega - and ended up going to Japan to work there in their offices in Haneda. At the time we were advising not only on that but also on a home HMD and console tie up - which we've discussed here on Gamasutra recently in another blog thread.

The project we were doing with / for Sega was their first Arcade VR game. Originally called TecWar, but renamed to NetMerc as dear old Bill Shatner had the name TecWar first. There is some irony there!

NetMerc was a technical success, despite the tiny team we had comprising myself and one other guy as the programmers, with an artist each us to keep us company. It also debuted very well in public field tests against heavy weights like Daytona which were launched around the same time on newer hardware! I think a lot of it to be honest was the novelty value of the VR experience: The headset, the massive platform with a gun the size of something which would look more at home on top of a HumVee that you could rotate 360 degrees, and the big wall sized screen which showed spectators what the player could see. We had a fantastic time at the Tokyo Game Show that year. I have some cool pictures of the unit from there if anyone is interested. Good times.

Throughout all of that time the biggest problem was the resolution of the LCDs in headsets, and making people comfortable with the quality / focus of the images and the weight of the helmet..

Oh, and tracker lag - which genuinely bought on motion-sickness in many people. Until we could get the tracking data into the device and images rendered that same frame using fresh position data VR was doomed IMO. Even a few milliseconds of lag is immediately off putting when it's your only view of the world.

For most people you had to learn to relax in the system. Your first or second go would not be much more than an experience. Many stopped right there I suspect. When I watched people play for the first time they would often come out of the system saying they had a good time, but you could tell they had not really got a clue what just happened, and wanted to save face. Their face or ours, well, I am still not sure! Or perhaps they just wanted to say they had done it and that was good enough. But VR didn't in my experience get a lot of repeat players except for hardcore gamer geeks.

Having said all that *we* had some fantastic networked games within the combat simulations. But then we were in the systems everyday. And there was something strangely cathartic, in a perverse way, about watching inexperienced people scrape along walls, staring at their own feet, and insisting they were having a great time and that they "got it".

At the time I took a sabbatical from the industry in the late 90's I had decided VR still had a long way to go before it was as immersive as we hoped it could be, and as easy and comfortable to use as it needed to be for the mass market. I also believed it would be a long time before the things I / we wanted to do creatively could realistically be achieved in digital entertainment. This was as much a limit of gaming hardware at the time as the inherent problems with the VR framework.

Our CEO during that period was still dreaming about "full body VR suits" and all the kinky stuff that possibly entailed, and the "mass market appeal" it might have. Funny in retrospect, as it was clear that just like the internet the moment that VR as a network medium was generally accessible something carnal would creep in and become an avalanche!

Ultimately Virtuality folded.

Looking back I personally think I made the right call to change paths at that point in my career. I thought at the time it would be a good 10 years before it would be realistically possible as a real main stream entertainment media.

As some people have already mused I also think that *if* 3D TV takes off in the home, and home motion control systems take hold on modern entertainment systems, and they get rid of the lag (which is still worse in those home units now than it was in commercial applications back in the day) then maybe VR will be resurrected in some way, by someone....

Awesome backstory! Polhemus trackers are what we used. Actually, we took one of those old stand up pods which originally had an Amiga in it (we removed it) and hooked it up to a WinXP PC and ran a special version of Aerial Antics on it. It was just a matter of interfacing some legacy C code with our 3D engine via a .dll to get the Polhemus head and hand trackers working with the game. We actually got the game working with a more modern tracker as well but the goal was to reinvigorate the old hardware with new games.

Stephen,

Kindly take your laptop -- go to a coffee shop -- and rework your comment into a detailed 5,000 word article on your experiences.

Please!

;-)

Some interesting history on Virtuality and the early days of consumer VR:

http://www.meanmachinesmag.co.uk/media_view/193/virtuality-rg.php

http://www.meanmachinesmag.co.uk/media_view/195/pac-man-vr-rg.php

@Mark, I've already given a fairly detailed account of my times in VR to a guy who is writing a book on the history of the Amiga, and another on VR generally. Assuming those go ahead then I'll let them polish my words. :)

I notice that Andy ("the other guy") on our programming team at Sega has just dropped by with some nice links that should keep you satisfied for a while. Thanks Andy.