What's The Future Of Virtual Reality?

The problem with the future of VR isn’t working out what it looks like, it’s working out which possible future we might get.

- Dan Griliopoulos

We’ve had a century and a half of imagining what virtual reality might be. The first pseudo-VR arrived in 1838, with Charles Wheatstone’s stereoscope. This produced a 3D image using two splayed lenses and a pair of slightly different drawings.

Since then, we’ve been imagining what could come next. The first fiction to posit something recognizable as VR was Stanley G. Weinbaum’s Pygmalion’s Spectacles, in 1935. It featured a pair of goggles showing “a movie that gives one sight and sound… taste, smell, and touch… You are in the story, you speak to the shadows and they reply, and instead of being on a screen, the story is all about you, and you are in it.”

After that, our concept of VR stabilized. We knew what it was going to be like, we just had to wait for technology to catch up. Palmer Luckey’s creation of the duct-tape-and-prayer Oculus Rift prototype showed us the time had come.

Even now, there are multiple routes where VR may go. Is it going to be Star Trek’s Holodeck, where VR is headset-free? A totally immersive all-body VR, like The Matrix? The parochial virtual universes of Iain Banks’s books Feersum Enjinn and Surface Detail? Are we going to be masters of our own universes, as in Otherland and Ready Player One, or pawns, as in Neuromancer and Snow Crash? Let’s consider the possibilities….

THE SHORT TEAM

At the moment, there are four major options for VR, in decreasing order of impressiveness and price: Valve and HTC’s Vive; Facebook’s Oculus Rift (we scored the Vive an 8, and the Rift a 7, to remind you); Oculus and Samsung’s Gear VR; and Google’s Cardboard. How are they each likely to improve over the next year or two?