Virtual reality in culture

Everything you ever wanted to know about headsets, Oculus, Magic Leap, and simulator sickness.

03.03.2019

03.03.2019

All hail the headset. Or, alternatively, all ignore the headset, because it’s gonna be a dismal failure anyway.

That’s pretty much the conversation around virtual reality, a technology by which computer-aided stimuli create the immersive illusion of being somewhere else—and a topic on which middle ground is about as scarce as affordable housing in Silicon Valley. VR is either going to upend our lives in a way nothing has since the smartphone, or it’s the technological equivalent of trying to make “fetch” happen. The poles of that debate were established in 2012, when VR first re-emerged from obscurity at a videogame trade show; they’ve persisted through Facebook’s $3 billion acquisition of headset maker Oculus in 2014, through years of refinement and improvement, and well into the first-and-a-halfth generation of consumer hardware.

Source Wired