This past June’s Electronic Entertainment Expo (E3) was dominated by virtual reality. Which makes sense, as VR and gaming make natural bedfellows, and gamers tend to be very early adopters. But with consumer VR gear about to come to market—including phone-maker HTC’s Vive headset, Facebook-owned Oculus releasing the Rift early next year, Sony’s Project Morpheus for the PlayStation 4, and products from a variety of smaller companies—it’s time the rest of the world got comfortable in virtual spaces.
“As people look at this industry, there is this natural gravitation toward gaming, where we know there is pent-up demand, interest, anticipation for VR,” says Jeff Gattis, executive director for marketing in HTC’s emerging devices division. “But this is a transformative technology, really changing the way people interact with computers. To pay off that promise, you have to show scenarios beyond gaming.”
Although virtual reality really blew up in the ’90s (go and watch Lawnmower Man and Disclosure as high-profile spotlights on the emerging tech), it eventually was seen more as a gimmick than anything else. It lent to some great arcade games, but the public forgot about VR before it even came to households.
But it never died. In the 20 years since VR’s initial blip of pop culture popularity, it has been honed and refined, and, thanks to affordable tech on the horizon, could eventually find itself as ubiquitous as the smartphone or HDTV.
Read the full article at Fast Company.