On March 19th Sony announced a Virtual Reality Headset for PS4. Virtual Reality is a computer simulated environment that can simulate physical presence in real or imaginary worlds.
Virtual Reality has been done in the past. Virtual Boy was made by the game company Nintendo and released on July 21, 1995 in Japan and August 14, 1995 in North America. This console is known as a colossal failure. Only selling 777,000 total units and at a price point at $180. It was discontinued 7 months later. The console gave headaches after only playing for a couple of minutes. There was another console released by Tiger Electronics. This was supposed to compete with Nintendo’s Virtual Boy. It was also a failure and sales figures of the console are not even existent. Virtual Reality was already buried in the 1990’s.
Then out of the blue in 2012 on the website Kickstarter, Virtual Reality came up again. It was called the Oculus Rift. The Oculus Rift was a headset instead of a gaming console; if you moved your head, your character in the game would move his head. The gamer could look around as if they were actually the person in the game. It only needed $250,000 to be fully funded. Instead of raising $250,000, it raised $2,437,429. This is known as one of Kickstarters best funded projects. On March 2013 people started buying Oculus Rift dev kit’s. As of February 23rd 2014 the Oculus Rift had sold over 50,000 units. Over 50 PC games support Oculus Rift such as Team Fortress 2, Outlast, and Half Life 2.
Sage Hasse has owned Oculus Rift for about 5 months. As to why he bought it, he replied, “It seemed like an interesting device to me. I wanted a new gaming experience and I believed this device would give me a different experience.” When asked how often he uses the Oculus Rift, “I don’t use it that often anymore, for the first 2 months I couldn’t stop using it. I only use the Oculus Rift if it there is a new horror video game.” He plans to use his Oculus Rift in the future when there are more games coming out for it.
Isaiah McCall said, “It is something that sparks my interest. I would like to try it out if I had the chance.” He went on to say, “If I owned a VR [Virtual Reality] headset, I honestly don’t know how much I would use it. I don’t want to use it every time I play a game. I would just use it if I feel the game would be better or more interesting with the headset.”
Virtual Reality has failed in the past, but now it seems to be getting new life with Oculus’s Oculus Rift and Sony’s development of their own VR headset.Virtual Reality will most likely be a success in the near future just because people have shown so much support to Oculus from the Kickstarter campaign and Sony’s action to finally announce that they were working on it. (Sony has announced that they have been working on VR since fall 2010.)
