Market’s Rat Racing

Like I mentioned above VR came into the market but greedy corporations and their marketing divisions spoil it. Obviously, that hardware and software weren’t prepared for the immersive VR experience at your home.

The result of the Market’s Rat Racing was a disappointment in VR. Actually, a lot of the concepts that was prepared for the serial manufacturing was never released.

Look closer at Sega VR, Nintendo VirtualBoy and Atari Jaguar VR.

While game companies tried to sale their “VR” products Silicon Graphics Inc., (SGI) started developing OpenGL in 1991 and released it in January 1992. Open Graphics Library (OpenGL) is a cross-language, cross-platform application programming interface (API) for rendering 2D and 3D vector graphics. It’s a very important point not only because game developers now could write a code without worrying about drivers compatibility, also because it’s open-source (it also everywhere now — power of open-source projects) and without OpenGL we would not have WebGL decade later.

Keep calm and do VR

There were good exceptions, still not so good in terms of tactical and technical characteristics but we are getting closer to the actual VR.

Period from 1995 to 2011 was an HMDs competition. Most distinctive were VFX1 Headgear in 1995. This HMD had sensors, speakers, cyber puck joystick and simple installation.

VFX1 could cost you $695, characteristics 263 x 230 LCD capable of 256 colors.

Also, just watch the commercial. It’s always funny how actors overreacting in these commercials.

Next device what I want to mention is SEOS 120/40 HMD. Unfortunately, I didn’t find any video, but you could read this revivew. Which is more interesting is the price and characteristics: $70,000 – 1280 x 1024 LCD 120 degree view.

During the 2000s appeared a lot of different HMDs. You could just look at this table — http://sed.inrialpes.fr/ARCHIVE/PRV/CATALOG/hmd.html and another one http://3dj.at/data/vr/hmd/list/hmdlist.html

Well, enough with HMDs experiments.

2006 WebGL

WebGL evolved out of the Canvas 3D experiments started by Vladimir Vukićević at Mozilla. Vukićević first demonstrated a Canvas 3D prototype in 2006. By the end of 2007, both Mozilla and Opera had made their own separate implementations.

In early 2009, the non-profit technology consortium Khronos Group started the WebGL Working Group, with initial participation from Apple, Google, Mozilla, Opera, and others.

So now we have a union library for 3d graphics on the web. Thanks to Mozilla, it’s also interesting because later we will talk about A-Frame — comprehensive 3d framework supported by Mozilla.

Let’s take a little break just to mention Palmer… lucky… who came up on KickStarter with his VR headset Oculus Rift DK1. And this is also an essential step because it gave a new impulse to the whole VR. People again start to believe in the bright and shiny VR future.

Mobile VR era begins

In 2014 Google designed Google Cardboard. It basically a folded piece of carton but if you putt your phone inside you could achieve no jokes VR (depends on your phone hardware of course). Only for 5 buсks — VR for everyone indeed. Of course, Google Cardboard has limitations comparing to fancy and expensive VR headsets, but it’s in your pocket, mobile and everyone can afford it.

In 2014 we already had Three.js and some other JS-libraries working with 3d. But in 2015 A-Frame appears.

2015 A-Frame