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In 1993, Sega do one Power rangers– a VR headset that hoped the company would bring virtual reality to the masses. “It takes us into the future,” said MTV’s Alan Hunter on stage at this summer’s Consumer Electronics Show. “The future, of course, being virtual reality.” On a climax reel behind him, a guy wearing a Sega VR shoots down space objects with a controller. “Just a game? No way!”
Sega never took out the headphones. He was interrupted shortly after the show and then disappeared. Even the video game archivists at the Video Game History Foundation couldn’t find one. But as of today, Sega VR lives on. Like the necromancers of the digital age, Frank Cifaldi, director of the Video Game History Foundation, and head of digital curator Rich Whitehouse resurrected Sega VR, emulating it with the game Sega VR. Nuclear rush on a modern Vive VR headset. “I can’t think of too many cases where anyone has practically replicated material without actually having access to it,” Cifaldi says.
By the early 90s, the endless promise of virtual reality had become something close to the mainstream. In 1984, computer scientist and author Jaron Lanier founded the first VR startup, VPL Research Inc. It sold VR glasses and gloves. At the time, he thought VR would be “a cross between cinema, jazz and programming,” he wrote in his 2017 memoir. The dawn of the new all. That same year, William Gibson wrote about junkies “jerked off” by the “consensus hallucination” of virtual reality technology in his seminal novel. Neuromancer. It took a little while for the gaming industry to take hold of the technology. In 1991, a company called Virtuality began making human-sized VR gaming cockpits with robot shoot-em-ups and simulation games that would eventually populate malls across the United States. In 1993, VR was on the cover of Popular science magazine.
Sega wanted to democratize VR, bring it into the living room at a family price. What it came with looks like an Oculus Quest through a classic Nickelodeon ad: a red-streaked plastic visor that wraps around the head. Circular foam earcups cover each ear. Inside, it has two LCD screens. (“Color screens for stereoptic vision,” one screen reads in the CES presentation.) In 1993, a company called Ono-Sendai created a key piece of the Sega VR puzzle when it patented a sensor for inexpensive orientation, which determined the angular angle of a player. orientation and momentum in relation to the earth’s magnetic field and the gravitational field. Sega authorized it. According to the Video Game History Foundation, the technology could be made for a dollar, which helped Sega meet its price target of $ 200, which is ten dollars more than the Sega Genesis console it used.
Sega has browsed its VR headset at trade shows and stocked it with marketing materials. But then all of a sudden he pulled out the plug. Citing an immersion overdose, according to Whitehouse, the company claimed that “the experience was so realistic and immersive that it posed a high risk of injury to players moving while using it. Whitehouse doubts it; a research firm at the time warned of illness, headaches, and dizziness in young users.
How did the team of preservationists bring Sega VR back from the dead? Emulation. Games are software. If the tools used to run it are out of date or out of date, the games may be interrupted or simply disappear. The Video Game History Foundation is particularly interested in preserving the source code of video games, which Cifaldi describes as “one of the most volatile and important things to document.”
The Sega VR project is different, however. The goal is not just to make an old game work; it’s about using details about that game to infer how the long-lost headset it belonged to also performed. Two relics for the price of one.
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