A few years ago, virtual reality was all the rage in Hollywood, helping to fuel the rise of Silicon Beach with the promise of reinventing the entertainment business.
At its peak, investors pumped $253 million into two dozen deals involving virtual and augmented reality start-ups in L.A. and Orange counties in 2016, hoping that pricey headsets projecting virtual worlds would become as popular as smartphones. But investment in the technology has slowed dramatically in recent years, and what seemed like a promising boom has largely fizzled.
Several California companies that raised millions of dollars have shut down or have laid off dozens of workers, as businesses scrambled to readjust their strategies in the face of lackluster consumer demand for VR headsets and a drought of capital.
Take heart, VR enthusiasts. It took several tries for video streaming to catch on, too.
(Score: 2) by crafoo on Tuesday January 15 2019, @10:54PM
All VR headsets from the 90s had tiny field of views (installations like CAVE being an exception). It was like looking through toilet paper tubes. This time around, in my opinion, the big innovation was extremely wide field of view. This changed the game. It's going to be big, we are just in the first stages of getting resolution, framerate, and feedback latency under control.
I'm biased though. I've been playing with various VR coding experiments since the Oculus DK1. my fav so far is an interior for the Mako I've modelled with a basic driving simulation using Bullet3D. Busy adding various objects inside the cockpit that crash around when you take hard turns (fast food trash, soda cans, rubber squaak chickens). It's absurd. I'm having fun. I have high hopes for VR this time around.