A Brief History to VR
posted 01/10/2022 by Maxim Grin
Virtual reality has been an up and coming technological advancement in recent years, and you’ve most likely heard “VR” or “virtual reality” used by friends, family, or even big companies such as Facebook/Meta, Sony, Google, and Valve.
Virtual reality, or VR for short, explains itself with its name. VR is reality made virtual through computer-generated images. With the use of Unity or Unreal Engine, two well-known game development software (that are both free), experiences for VR can be created similar to how game developers create games for a vast majority of gaming experiences. So with the availability of Unreal Engine and Unity, the creation of VR experiences is only increasing.
VR has been around since the late 1900s, having its uses in NASA to drive the Mars rover, the medical field to provide PTSD treatment to veterans, and in arcades for entertainment. But VR has started becoming a very real thing in the 2010s. In 2010, the prototype for the Oculus Rift was created by Palmer Luckey and earned $2.4 million on Kickstarter. The company was bought by Facebook (now known as Meta) in 2014 and made Rift the first VR experience available as a consumer product. This development started the tidal wave that would be the VR consumer market.
In the same year, Sony announced that they would also be making a VR headset for their PlayStation 4, meaning that console users would also be able to join the fun. And in 2016, HTC released its HTC Vive for Steam users, the first SteamVR headset in its series. In short, Steam is a game distributor solely for computer games and is a space where many game developers publish their games. With the development of the HTC Vive, the number of VR games began to skyrocket as game developers began producing VR titles that would be widely available to gamers.
Gaming is one of the biggest uses for VR due to the large number of VR titles made available for SteamVR, the Oculus Store, and PlayStationVR. While the PlayStationVR game library is limited, the Oculus store and Steam provide a wide range of games. And with outside programs such as Revive, PCVR users can play all games, whether it’s exclusive to the Oculus store or not.
Since then, the VR market has been increasing with Oculus and SteamVR making updated headsets with the Oculus Quest 2 and Valve Index being the most recent developments for Oculus and SteamVR. Both headsets are equipped with higher resolution and field of view lenses, built-in tracking, and while the Quest 2 can go completely wireless, the Index has the ability to track the movements of every finger and the amount of pressure you are providing while gripping the controller. This means that game developers can make your experience even more immersive, allowing you to slide your hand down the handle of a hammer or sword by applying less pressure, and making the action of throwing objects feel a lot more natural.
Virtual Reality has come a long way in a short amount of time, but it is a piece of technology that is continuing to grow rapidly both technologically and in terms of usability. Something to go over for another time.