The incredible thing about the technology is that you feel like you’re actually present in another place with other people. People who try it say it’s different from anything they’ve ever experienced in their lives.
Mark Zuckerberg
Virtual Reality (VR) is cool, but it’s not a big deal. For so many years, the gaming devices’ battles were exclusively between consoles and PCs. In 2016, Playstation and Xbox finally had a new contender, and it was determined to change gaming forever – Oculus Rift.
Now, if you followed this story back then, you know how much a single device cost – almost a thousand dollars, before taxes. Today, Oculus Rift is not as obscenely expensive but still more than a fully-geared gaming desktop. Large tech companies like Samsung, Google and HTC believed in the future of VR and invested billions into the project. Little do they know that people still like reality reality over virtual reality.
VR is a cool technology for other things like virtual reality tours and teaching people how to survive crises. For gaming, not so much. When video games upgraded from Pong to 2D to 3D to hyper-realistic graphics, it took time for people to get used to each stage. We are still on the hyper-realistic-graphics stage. Not only that, VR is synonymous to AI. Now that’s an entirely different beast to slay, so I won’t even go there. AI’s bad rep may also have trickled down to VR.
Perception is everything. VR and AI are similar in the same way they are opposite to each other. They’re both still very new technologies that can change the world. No one truly understands their capabilities or if there is a limit to their capabilities. Our current devices all have a “ceiling of innovation,” as I’d like to call it. Once devices reach this ceiling, we have to start looking for new, better ways to deliver information.
VR and AI devices both claim they can help people in some way. Sooner or later, developers will also claim VR and AI are capable of immersive gaming like our current devices. I suppose they can replace consoles and PCs one day. Until VR and AI replace everything, I’m going to enjoy sitting in front of my TV, screaming at people through a headset.
