VR Reality

This is an essay about virtual reality and is aimed to inform individuals about the
challenges that virtual reality faced on it road to the mainstream. I hope that you at least learn
much more about this subject and leave this feeling enlightened.

The Road To VR
Today we dream of a future in which we can use the internet to be someplace else to
see and feel exotic places around the world and have created elaborate machines to attempt to
recreate or even create distant lands. But we didnt always see things that way it wasnt until the
inception of the panoramic mural was created that we realized how badly we wanted to be
somewhere other than here. We were content with just leaving it at that until later after the
invention of television and movies that we could see did we want more of an experience. One
man named Morton Heilig wanted to understand how we truly see an environment and
hypothesized that when experiencing something we use: seventy percent of our sight, also
using twenty percent of our hearing, five percent of smell, four percent of our touch, and only 1
percent of our taste. With this idea he concocted an idea to make a headset in which the user
could see hear and smell the place in which the television takes place and dubbed the
innovation the Stereoscopic-Television Apparatus or STA for short. The STA was the first of its
kind and led to Heilige thinking about a more plausible alternative and so he created the
Sensorama. The Sensorama was the same idea as the STA but instead of being head mounted
it was a static machine and Heilig managed to build a successful prototype of it. The Sensorama
failed because of the high cost of production and the lack of marketability and thus cut his vision
short until it would be revisited later. After a man by the name of Ivan Sutherland with the help of
his student Bob Sproull created the first head-mounted display or HMD system. This system
could track the movements of the user and was able to make the user feel like he was
somewhere else. This technology was a huge leap forward and was designed to work with a
closed circuit camera system in which the user could be a safe distance away and be able to
monitor each camera individually. The HMD was dubbed the Sword of Damocles because the
devices motion tracking components were hanging overhead. These two men showed the limits
of the technology during the 1960s and set a precedent that really didnt make any big leaps
until more modern day HMD were created.

Virtual Reality Today

The virtual reality today starts with the Oculus Rift. The Oculus Rift was a crowdfunded
project on kickstarter from Oculus a then small company to build a prototype headset so that
game developers could get their hands on it and be able to incorporate it into the games they
made. It was successful at first proving that there was demand for a Virtual reality headset with
its dev kit .This demand made it easier for Oculus to gain more financial support through outside

companies than before. With the success of the dev kit 1 under way they began to try to fix one
of the main problems facing the system, motion sickness after prolonged use.the creator of the
Oculus Rift Palmer Luckey met with Alan Yates a Valve Engineer at the time and discussed
these issues. Yates lent Palmer the prototype that was to become the HTC Vive, we know
today. This gift gave Palmer the groundwork to begin fixing the motion sickness issues that the
first kit had and ended up doubling the amount of playtime that users could experience before
the nausea set in with their next development kit. During the shift between phase 1 and phase 2
Oculus was purchased by Facebook which caused the Oculus, and also virtual reality, to gain a
great boost in terms of credibility. Later that year the Development Kit 2 came out for the Oculus
Rift and that was a giant leap as it focused on fixing the motion sickness problem the first kit
had. this lead into the first argument that mainstream consoles should support either the Oculus
Rift or their own virtual reality headset. Playstation saw the increase in demand for virtual reality
and decided that since their gamers wanted a virtual reality headset they would give them a
virtual reality headset and announced project Morpheus a VR headset for the PlayStation 4 at
Electronic Entertainment Expo or E3 in 2014. Later in March 2016 Oculus Released its first
commercially viable Oculus Rift for everyone to enjoy. A week later Valve Software and HTC
finished development and released their own headset for PC gamers called the HTC Vive. The
Vibe was created to be a direct competitor to the Oculus Rift because of lack of negotiation with
the former Oculus company after being purchased by Facebook. Today the two top Selling
Consumer headsets are the Oculus Rift and the HTC Vive and with little games on both it is
hard to tell which one will be the mainstream virtual reality headset.

The Health benefits outweigh risk

Virtual reality has been used to help treat many different things over the years and has
had many benefits for the medical community. The only problem with virtual reality was the
accessibility and that is solved with the new age of virtual reality. Oculus Rift and HTC Vive has
opened up the possibility to use virtual reality at a large scale with more uses because of the
increase in visual looks. Of course, with any new technology, there are risks that we take. The
main problem with headsets still lies in its nausea but that problem has been largely dealt with
by the time the official Oculus Rift and HTC Vive have been released. Other issues with headset
where the seizures that may be caused by the flashing images but that is apparent with this new
technological age from our laptops to the tv that will still always be a problem we face. But the
medical benefits are extraordinary it has been shown that virtual reality has been used as a pain
relief to burn victims and has helped when morphine couldn't help anymore. VR is even used to
treat phobias such as the fear of heights and spiders. Virtual reality doesn't stop there. They use
virtual reality in some med school in order for doctors to train to become surgeons. They even
use virtual reality to show a 3-dimensional cat scan so that the doctors would be able to see
inside people without having to resort to invasive surgery. They even allow doctors to do surgery
with a robot while they control its movements via a virtual reality headset. Even if virtual reality is

a risky technology it is still extremely helpful to the medical community and so should be
pursued further in order to expand the arsenal of a doctor's diagnostic tools.

The Future will be everywhere

Virtual reality is still new and there is so much more to be found even know with the
Virtual Reality Treadmill and VRcade we are still just beginning to see what virtual reality is
capable of. One of the Co-founders of Atari Noland Bushnell says that it is heading into the
arcades. Bushnell thinks that since the price of VR headsets and equipment is too high that
many consumers will not be able to afford it so easily and as such will most likely look for an
arcade that could give them the same VR experience at a much more reasonable price.
Bushnell was alive when Atari went to arcades and then to the homes. He speaks with
knowledge of the past examples of video games through history. Others think that virtual reality
will begin to start being more physical as shown with the treadmill so much so that one day we
would be able to walk and touch the virtual world. Still VR is an untested technology and no
matter what anybody thinks it is still too early to tell how it will end up developing in this new age
of technology. Even now IBM japan is trying to make a virtual reality simulator that replicates a
show called sword art online in which the protagonist is playing a virtual reality game in which
the helmet is tapped into his brain stem allowing full immersion while being completely still. But
there is still ideas that we cannot yet fathom and so we hope for the best for virtual reality.

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