Thursday 20 October 2016

No VR until this...

Despite the huge buzz around VR, I'm not convinced, and I'm not buying. Oh... and no one else is buying it either.

VR has, and always has had, a big problem. It requires you to put something on your head that makes you look ridiculous. It closes you off from the world around you and leaves you oblivious to real world events.

The only place that most people would accept these problems is in their own bedroom or, more likely, bedsit. There will always be a good number of early adopters who will buy the next new thing, for gaming and for ... erm... well, thats it. Just gaming.

The day I buy VR is the day that the headset is a pair of glasses. Not dopey google glass glasses, but a regular Ray-Ban or Oakley. Because we're so very good at miniaturisation, it wont be too long before your regular sunnies will happily overlay real life with an HD screen and enough battery life to give you a couple of hours of entertainment.

Black Mirror's video-recording eye-balls made compelling viewing, and brought about some fun discussions about the moral aspects of video recording. It rather skipped over the aspect that i found most appealing... the ability to lie down, press a button and watch your own personal entertainment, without finding the best seat on the sofa, the best viewing angle and the perfect sized screen.

Put the screen in the kind of glasses that we actually want to wear and the nature of entertainment will have been changed dramatically. Only recently have we unplugged the TV to carry it around with us. The next step is to wear it, everyday, everywhere we go.

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