Oh man, the memories. I remember playing the original Doom game with a virtual reality helmet at a gaming convention back in 1994 or so when I was a little kid. It was a tiny convention at a small Finnish town, but I remember seeing same kind of helmets in photographs from CeBITs and E3's in computer magazines.
Does anyone remember a consumer VR helmet circa 1993? It had a helmet with displays of roughly "mode 13h" resolution and a hand held hockey puck with a few buttons? The helmet and the puck had accelerometers and/or inclinometers and/or gyroscopes or something to detect movement.
Head turning affected in-game camera turn and tilting the puck was movement. Puck buttons were fire, change weapon, etc. Proper FPS aiming would have been difficult but Doom's projectile collision detection is 2d anyway :)
I had one years ago that came from an IT auction for the princely sum of £40. That included basically everything but the PC including the big nest thing you had to stand in. I set it up to work with AlphaWorld on a windows 95 machine. It required a bit of work to get it to accept straight VGA signals and it wasn't the stereoscopic variant. It sat in my living room for a year and mainly collected junk.
The experience both rocked and sucked. The setup was dialled into UUNet at 14.4k and you could count the pixels but it was still slightly cool. It made your eyes and neck hurt badly though.
Ended up on eBay in '00 and sold for £1 because "buyer collects".
Does anyone remember a consumer VR helmet circa 1993? It had a helmet with displays of roughly "mode 13h" resolution and a hand held hockey puck with a few buttons? The helmet and the puck had accelerometers and/or inclinometers and/or gyroscopes or something to detect movement.
Head turning affected in-game camera turn and tilting the puck was movement. Puck buttons were fire, change weapon, etc. Proper FPS aiming would have been difficult but Doom's projectile collision detection is 2d anyway :)