Image: Youtube (Wrestling With Gaming)
Virtual reality still has a way to go, but it’s pretty much solidified itself as a technology.
The situation in the ’90s was a lot less certain, and the technology far less powerful. But that didn’t stop companies from trying, including SEGA, who put together a prototype called SegaScope 3-D.
After being offered, and declining, the option to license the technology in Nintendo’s Virtual Boy, SEGA started working on a prototype in the early ’90s.
The history of SEGA’s VR headset, which had two LCD screens and a design that looked like a cross between Star Trek and Robocop, was covered in a video on the Wrestling With Gaming YouTube channel.
It’s a fascinating look at how VR tech came together then, the challenges that faced VR, and why the VR headset ultimately failed. Also, there’s some awfully cringey ’90s advertising and acting to boot.
Mark Pesce eventually had the answer as to why Sega quietly canned the project in 1994: the technology wasn’t good enough. “It’s actually really easy to make someone sick in VR, and really hard to give them a good experience when you’re running on a 8MHz microprocessor,” Pesce said during a talk.
Unsurprisingly, it would take roughly two decades before that technological problem could be competently answered.
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