VR has been a punchline since the 1990s, all nausea and broken promises. Then Palmer Luckey shows up on Kickstarter with a prototype that actually works, and for the first time in twenty years I find myself paying attention for the right reasons. The Rift is still a developer kit, not a consumer product, but the demos coming out of it are doing something VR has never reliably done before: making the headset disappear. You stop thinking about the thing strapped to your face and start thinking about where you are.
Cheap screens, clever software
The trick is timing. Smartphone displays have made small, high-resolution panels affordable, and Luckey has paired one with wide-angle lenses and low-latency head tracking to fix the one thing that always broke VR: the lag between moving your head and the image catching up. John Carmack of id Software is championing the project, which is exactly why developers are paying attention. When Carmack is excited about a display technology, you take it seriously.
The trend for the year ahead
If the dev kits ship and the latency holds up, VR gets a second life, this time built on cheap mobile components instead of million-dollar lab rigs. Expect developers to pile in fast. The barrier to entry has collapsed, and the first wave of serious VR software is probably six to twelve months away.
I have been burned by VR before, so the expectations are in check. But this is the most interested I have been in a headset, maybe ever. Somebody funded the future of immersion on Kickstarter. That does not happen unless the technology has actually crossed a threshold.
Part of Two Decades of XR, my running diary of virtual, augmented, and mixed reality.