- When Facebook bought virtual reality company Oculus in early 2014, virtual reality blew up. While game and movie studios began reimagining the future, others looked back at the “old days” of VR — a loosely remembered period in the 1990s when gloves and goggles were super cool and everyone was going to get high on 3D graphics. But things were never so simple. We spoke to 18 key VR innovators about their work and dreams. What follows is over two decades of memories and visions for what the future could be.
I still have a hacked Power Glove and (stolen) portable TV and Fresnel lens glued to a pair of swim goggles in a box somewhere. I made them when I was... somewhere in middle school from instructions someone posted on Usenet, and spent the better part of a summer learning C and trying to make a haunted house in Avril. I don't think virtual reality is going to end up being a profound technology anymore, but I still love that stuff for giving me the sense that The Future was a thing you could hack together in your garage rather than waiting for someone to sell it to you, and that I needed to because I sure couldn't afford to buy it. That wasn't true either, of course, technologists are very much beholden to capital just like everyone else, but it's good bullshit to have believed once.