A Rant About the State of Virtual Reality

I’ve been around virtual reality for the better part of a decade now. I got my start with ARToolKit and its crazy QR codes back in 2008/2009, and quickly began building for the Oculus DK1 in college (I managed to get a Microsoft Kinect and OpenGL demonstration hooked up for my university in a little under a month). While I may not be one of the more vocal folks in the industry, I’ve been slowly building my own set of tools and learning about the underlying architecture for things like inside out tracking and distortion warping of lenses, to the higher level design questions like how to create comfortable experiences for users. I want to take some time to quickly look back on where VR has come from, and try to take some educated guesses on where it is going.

For starters, I’ve always been focused on virtual reality from a developer perspective. This means that a lot of my focus is on where the industry will go for general consumers, not for enthusiasts. I myself may be an enthusiast, but the people I build things for generally are not. This is why I’ve always been adamant that the Oculus Quest is the next big thing, even though “standalone 6 degrees of freedom (6-dof) headsets have been done before”. Over the years I’ve come to find that there’s a general set of “minimum technologies” needed for virtual reality to really succeed: 6-dof head tracking, 6-dof hand tracking, a…