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Picopede t1_j4ukddh wrote

Good decision!

Just yesterday I was watching a video about the Virtual Boy… https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e9FhIZkm4cw …and I was surprised to learn that Nintendo rushed it. Maybe it wouldn't have flopped (at least not so bad) if Nintendo gave it more time and resources.

But also, the iPhone has AR right now. I've played around with it, used it to view new Apple products, but it's not one of those features that I use a lot.

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jl_theprofessor t1_j4vylx5 wrote

Virtual boy was trying to do things we just didn’t have the tech for yet. I had that thing it weighed about 20 pounds. They said you could lie down and use it instead of playing it on top of a desk but that never really worked.

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Pubelication t1_j4y5836 wrote

Amazing use of the available technology though. I believe the biggest downside was that it caused dizzyness.

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ilikestuffthatsgood t1_j4yd85b wrote

I played Mario tennis for like 45 mins once, and when I took my face out of it I looked at a can of Pepsi and it looked bright red instead of blue. The virtual boy was no joke

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SmashTagLives t1_j4ykb6a wrote

The same thing happens if you stare at the color red for long enough and then look at a white wall.

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Hvarfa-Bragi t1_j4x1n1e wrote

There's only three features to AR and all three are missing from all current projects.

Reliable general object recognition so that data can be put onto normal things,

an open-protocol data ecosystem that would allow banal data about the world to be shared,

and most importantly, stylish, high quality, unobtrusive glasses reasonably indistinguishable from normal eyeglasses.

Tldr all the things that would make AR awesome are things we can't do.

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SmashTagLives t1_j4ykk8a wrote

Yeah, it needs to be something that people would wear even when they aren’t using it.

Really, it needs to be a status symbol

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pM-me_your_Triggers t1_j4wci27 wrote

That was also almost 30 years ago. Mainstream VR has been a thing for 5+ years

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predator_handshake t1_j4xoard wrote

It’s not quite mainstream yet. Outside a decent sized niche in gaming and porn, a vast majority of people are not using it

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pM-me_your_Triggers t1_j4xtfea wrote

Something can be mainstream without the vast majority of people using said thing.

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AkirIkasu t1_j56gmga wrote

Honestly it's very doubtful that they would have been able to make enough of an improvement to make it successful. Most of the problem was the marketing, which really overpromised what it could do; they tried to pretend it was a virtual reality machine when in reality the most it could do was display low-resolution graphics with the illusion of depth and none of the core technologies needed for VR like head tracking or actual realtime 3D graphics.

It was more of a toy than anything else, and if it came out as a toy instead of a game system we would have thought of it as being much more successful.

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