A man who invented VR goggles 50 years too soon (2016)

https://spectrum.ieee.org/the-man-who-invented-vr-goggles-50-years-too-soon

by andsoitis • 2 years ago

140 110 2 years ago

spectrum.ieee.org

paulpauper• 2 years ago

it's like cellphones. Took decades until the flip phone and then iPhone. But I think it's still too early to say VR is mainstream. It is still a niche.

cooper_ganglia• 2 years ago

I’ve frequently compared modern VR headsets with cell phones of the 1980s. Big, bulky pieces of metal and glass that will one day look comical. Meanwhile this guy invents VR of the 1960s!

ClassyJacket• 2 years ago

I feel like the Quest could be very light if they took the Apple approach and moved the battery and computer to a pocket box. Even before any of these headsets existed I imagined most of them being that way.

charcircuit3• 2 years ago

That would need quite the cable to support 6 camera video feeds, 2 display video feeds, 2 audio feeds, and some other control data in addition to power.

jojobas2• 2 years ago

Big and bulky wasn't really the problem, price was. Size/weight isn't an issue with a car-based phone, the fact that the phone was prices as much as a car is.

ghaff3• 2 years ago

Size/weight wasn't an issue as long as you were basically talking about a car-phone which was a valid but specific use-case. (Back in the day, my senior manager would occasionally give me rides from my car dealer and he'd put me on the phone with various senior sales people if there was something he wanted me to have a conversation with.) But you're right that the phone plans were also out of reach for all but execs and very high net-worth individuals. Heck, until the late 90s or so, cell phone usage was pretty expensive for a random person for all but very occasional use.

Terr_• 2 years ago

I wish more people knew/appreciated the incrementalism of progress.

A huge amount of constant "boring" percent-point improvement work or price-shifts are required to unlock the interesting changes, and often the people and companies associated with those new discoveries and ways of doing things are not really the first at all, but rather the lucky or the ruthless.

dataviz1000• 2 years ago

There is a saying. How to make a lot of money? Be first, best, or cheat.

noud• 2 years ago

I think it's "only" a quote from a movie called Margin Call [1]. But my grandma could have said it. ;)

[1] https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1615147/quotes/?item=qt1531207&...

iamflimflam1• 2 years ago

A lot of companies make money by being second or even third mover. There's a lot of benefit to having someone else create the market and then swoop in with a marginally better product (or even just better marketing).

rob74• 2 years ago

Well, in this case, stereoscopic photography had been a thing for a long time (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stereoscopy), and TVs were becoming widespread, so having the idea of combining the two is not some kind of stroke of genius. So I would give more credit to those who work on the incremental improvements that make the thing actually possible. Same as I would give more credit to the Wright brothers (and the other aviation pioneers) than to e.g. Leonardo da Vinci...

sschueller• 2 years ago

Prime example is OpenAI. General public thinks they have open some sort of Pandora's box when it has been a long iterative process of which a lot was done by others.

s_dev3• 2 years ago

OpenAI made the first AI chat bot product that didn't suck. There is a critical mass of innovation and Open AI got their 9kg of Uranium-235 together first as reflected in the market.

The real question isn't why did OpenAI get there first but why Google didn't, they had every advantage.

vidarh8• 2 years ago

I worked on a tablet computer ca. '99. We were not first, nor did we have any illusions we were. There were novel parts about our business plan, but a tablet was "obvious".

But it's an illustration of what you describe: When the iPhone and later iPad were launched, a lot of people thought they were new.

Even though there had been a whole fad of touch devices in phone and tablet form that had come and gone before the iPhone came.

A lot of us dismissed them at first because we'd seen that fad come and go, without realising that the genius of Apple with respect to those devices was not in the technical innovation, but in recognising when enough percent-point improvements had been made to unlock something that'd actually appeal to the general public.

"Our" tablet was tethered to a custom DECT base station (wifi wasn't widespread yet), had about 2 hours of battery. The resistive touch was awful, the screen resolution was small, and I had to cram Linux and the GUI, with space left over for a port of Opera, in to 16MB of flash and 16MB RAM in the original prototype...

In retrospect it had no chance in hell. But to a geek like me it was amazingly cool.

Other tablets and pda's with or without network and phone of that era were either attempts at slimming down laptops (e.g. I had a laptop with a touch screen on a swivel back then) that were still way too big, or they were devices like ours, with all sorts of limitations that geeks were fine with, and regular people weren't.

So when these devices disappeared one after the other, many of us dismissed the concept as a whole as tried and failed, rather than realise that the problem was one of enough percent-point improvements and not the concept.

And for all of the many issues I have with Apple, while they were not first, they still deserve plenty of credit for simply being smart enough to recognise when the time was right for this category of devices. Because a whole lot of companies got that timing extremely wrong.

fragmede3• 2 years ago

I remember the UMPC! That was a whole category of portable computers that didn't stand the test of time. Apple got a lot of things right, but I think it was less about timing and more about being usable, and affordable by the masses. Blackberry was great but it cost too much and didn't have a big enough battery.

alpaca128• 2 years ago

I'll never forget the crowd going bananas when Steve Jobs showed that you could scroll on the iPhone by just dragging the list with a finger, or zoom a map/website with two fingers.

Smartphones weren't new, but one where you didn't have to rely on buttons or an input pen on a terrible resistive touchscreen on the other hand was a big improvement. I still miss phones with qwerty keyboards but not the UIs before the iPhone.

jojobas2• 2 years ago

1963+50 = 2013. Give VR google adoption rate and 10% of weekly user among those who own them, I'd say he was more than 70 years too soon at least.

weikju• 2 years ago

you're not far off the mark

This article appears in the December 2016 print issue as “Before Virtual Reality Was Cool.”

iancmceachern3• 2 years ago

I have a story like this.

My first job out of engineering school was working for Dr. Robert Jarvik, of artificial heart fame.

He has a patent where there is a drawing of a person, on a treadmill, with cables tied to each joint. The idea is it's a virtual reality exercise setup. A Nintendo wii or kinect before sensors were any good.

https://patents.google.com/patent/US5577981A/en?q=(exercise)...

onion2k• 2 years ago

This is the problem with the public understanding of patents - something superficially similar like "measuring someone doing exercise" is only a patent violation if the method used is the same as the patented invention. The Wii and Kinect use remote sensors based on video. Clearly that isn't the same idea as your former boss's patent.

robertlagrant• 2 years ago

I don't think the previous comment implies anything otherwise.

iancmceachern3• 2 years ago

Huh?

charcircuit3• 2 years ago

These had nothing to do with VR. It was only allegedly able to be used for showing steroscopic video, like a stereoscope. It was not capable of showing a virtual reality to the user where they were present in it. It's hard to find any actual information about this device as the articles that refer to this don't cite their sources and probably just copied the information off of each other. There is no evidence that this actually worked and there is no mention of using lenses to make it possible to focus on the displays and then claim that it worked using small batteries leaves me skepticle. Not to even mention the weight this would be. I would be fairly confident to say this mock up was nonfunctional and was just an art project.

Edit: The source is page 79 of this life magazine https://archive.org/details/LifeV55n0419630726 Reading this makes it clear this was purely a mockup of an idea he had and not a functional device.

Sex has not distracted him in the slightest, however, from his lifelong interest in electronic gadgetry and in the new horizons being opened by the advance of more orthodox scientific knowledge. Neither has it inhibited his bent for invention on those occasions when he feels that duty and circumstance demand it —although he now invents only in broad outline, leaving the actual mechanics of the thing to others. His television eyeglasses —a device for which he feels millions yearn— constitute a ease in point
When the idea for this handy, pocket-size portable TV set occurred to him in 1936, he was forced to dismiss it as impractical. But a few weeks ago, feeling that the electronics industry was catching up with his New Deal-era concepts, he ordered some of his employees to build a mock-up.
"It is now perfectly possible to make thin, inch-square cathode lubes," he says, and to run them with low-voltage current from very small batteries with no danger at all of electrocuting the wearer. Sound can carried to the ear just as in a hearing aid. Television eyeglasses should weigh only about five ounces. Since there will be a picture for each eye, the glasses will make a stereoptical view possible and since they will be masked —like goggles— they can be used in bright sunlight. The user can take them out of his pocket anywhere, slip them on, flip a switch and turn to his favorite station." A V-type aerial protrudes from the top of Gernsback’s mock-up of the TV glasses. He likes the effect which can only he described as neo-Martian.

flohofwoe3• 2 years ago

You can use VR goggles to display static 2D images, and they would still be VR googles though. It's actually a bit disappointing how close he was with his mockup to modern VR goggles (which are still a bulky contraption wrapped around your head).

eesmith• 2 years ago

It's actually a bit disappointing how an art project by a dilettante is promoted over previous work by others, and praised as an early version of VR when Gersbeck meant it as a portable personal stereoscopic TV receiving shows from a broadcast station.

Here's pre-1963 work mentioned in a patent application at https://patents.google.com/patent/US20180224936A1/en?q=(Tele...

Morton Heilig's next commercial offering was the Telesphere Mask (patented 1960) and was the first example of a head-mounted display (HMD), albeit for a non-interactive film medium without any motion tracking. The headset provided stereoscopic 3D and wide vision with stereo sound.
In 1961, two Philco Corporation engineers (Comeau & Bryan) developed the first precursor to the HMD as we know it today—the Headsight. It incorporated an independent video screen for each eye and a magnetic motion tracking system, which was linked to a closed circuit camera. The Headsight was not actually developed for virtual reality applications (the term didn't exist then), but to allow for immersive remote viewing of dangerous situations by the military. Head movements would move a remote camera, allowing the user to naturally look around the environment. Headsight was the first step in the evolution of the VR head mounted display but it lacked the integration of computer and image generation.

Here's Heilig's patent for "Stereoscopic-television apparatus for individual use" https://patents.google.com/patent/US2955156A/en?q=(Morton)&i... , filed in 1957 and granted in 1960. Not only was it a head-mounted display, but it included air tubes so the wearer could feel a breeze, and optionally smell scents.

Headsight was on the cover of the magazine "Electronics" in 1961, https://archive.org/details/sim_electronics_1961-11-10_34_45... , and the article shows it actually worked, and was not a mockup.

bux93• 2 years ago

Using VR goggles that have no capability of viewing anything VR makes them just regular goggles though?

This tank simulator from the 1970s is a great example of early VR: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AcQifPHcMLE I wonder if there's anything earlier..

invariant72• 2 years ago

Here is the real deal: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Sword_of_Damocles_(virtual...

iancmceachern3• 2 years ago

I wish they had a picture

flohofwoe3• 2 years ago

Here's a video:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eVUgfUvP4uk

morphle• 2 years ago

Virtual Reality Before it Had That Name: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y2AIDHjylMI

tehjoker• 2 years ago

What if you had racing VR inside your car? Your windshield turns into a screen in "fun mode".

d--b• 2 years ago

CRT on your eye balls, ouch. That said, they look small and light. So maybe CRT is the way to go!

flohofwoe3• 2 years ago

I thought lasers right into the eye were the best option? At least that was presented as the 'holy grail' in a VR book I read in the early 90's (must have been this one, although my German edition looks very different: https://www.amazon.de/-/en/Howard-Rheingold/dp/0671778978).

QuantumG• 2 years ago

It may turn out to still be "too soon" if Meta doesn't up their game.

nothis• 2 years ago

There was a whole "now we finally have the technology!" push for VR in the late 80s/90s. Google the Forte VFX1, for example. Jaron Lanier made one of the first ever TED Talks in 1990 and it was about how VR will revolutionize everything ( https://youtu.be/lfvOACM-vbE ). It all... "rhymes".

I have this thought that maybe the problem with VR isn't the display technology but the input. Walking forward in a straight line is more or less an unsolvable problem. Motion sickness, the need of a frickin' threadmill, it's just messy. Touch feedback is an unsolvable problem unless you introduce robot gloves that can break your fingers. And then we have the question of use cases. VR solves a very specific spatial problem with an interconnection between perspective and hand movement. Very few problems exist in that space. It sometimes seems like VR creates more problems than it solves, in fact.

I low key believe in AR (although Apple finally played its cards and the result was underwhelming). Something about infinite and freely positioned 3D monitors. But VR? Great for cockpit sims and maybe some very specific professional uses. But useless for 99% of tasks of an average person.

wongarsu4• 2 years ago

Meta are the ones putting out lightweight cheap VR headsets. If it turns out we currently need a $3000 device to deliver VR people find acceptable, that is a sign it is "too soon" for mass adoption (still useful for many niche use cases though, like frequent travelers working on a plane or in a train).

In any case, the technology seems pretty close. If it takes another 3-10 years for tech to advance enough Meta is in a great position to execute as we get there.

actionfromafar• 2 years ago

This feels very relevent:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AcQifPHcMLE

It's not really VR, or is it? It's a model.

ShawnL30• 2 years ago

The cliche in the tech world: you want to be ahead of your time, but you don't want to be too far ahead of your time.

janoc3• 2 years ago

The problem is that the guy didn't "invent" anything, more like had a farfetched idea and left all "the practical details" to others to work out. That's like saying that Meliès invented space travel - he too had the idea of flying to the Moon in a gun projectile ...

It was only non-functioning mockup, at best, because the vacuum tube electronics of the era was simply incapable of producing a wireless device with those capabilities and weighing 140 (!!!) grams.

Compare that with the first actual working HMD which was the Sutherland's "Sword of Damocles" boom-mounted display from 1968.

EDIT: It was George Meliès not Lumiere brothers who made the famous film. Thanks for correcting me.

urbandw311er2• 2 years ago

That seems a little unfair to me. In many cases an original idea, regardless of ability to execute, is priceless.

I agree that execution is everything in terms of winning, though.

moffkalast4• 2 years ago

Ideas are a dime a dozen, anything that can be thought of eventually will be. It's no coincidence that new discoveries tend to get made by multiple people on different sides of the planet at roughly the same time once they have access to the same technological starting point to work from. Leibniz and Newton, Wright Brothers and Dumont, Bell Labs and Westinghouse, etc.

This is why patents are harmful imo (without even getting into patent trolls), all they do is restrict the commercialization to the one who was the fastest gun in the west at the patent office and hold back society from developing the technology further because the patentee has no incentive to improve the idea while they enjoy a two decade state sanctioned monopoly.

turzmo• 2 years ago

I think it depends on the nature of the idea. Some are so original that just the idea independent of the execution are worthy of note (famous conjectures in mathematics come to mind).

Some seem so obvious that it seems likely that many people dreamt of them at the same time. Hard to tell in this case.

brookst• 2 years ago

I just don’t see value in original ideas. IMO ideas are statistical outcomes that are bound to cowme to muktiple people, typically with ever-increasing audiences and likelihood as the world advances.

So there may some some first mover advantage in being lucky enough to be (among) the first to have an idea, but first mover itself is of debatable advantage.

Help me see why you think an original idea can be priceless?

tialaramex2• 2 years ago

No, ideas are worthless, anybody can come up an unlimited number of these ideas, if they were valuable you've got infinite value and that's ludicrous.

Several other things really are valuable, one thing that surprises people is that Advertising is actually valuable, if nobody knows you made this thing/ service/ whatever then they can't benefit from it. Now obviously there's a big gap between "Have you heard about bicycles? I was dubious at first but it was surprisingly easy to learn how to use it" and the pop-up insisting that maybe you've got Restless Leg Syndrome and should ask your doctor - but fundamentally advertising delivers some value for our society.

nottorp4• 2 years ago

That's like saying that Lumiere brothers invented space travel - they too had the idea of flying to the Moon in a gun projectile ...

Just to nitpick, it was Jules Verne's idea. The Lumieres just put it on screen.

boudin• 2 years ago

Just to add more nitpick to the nitpicking, it's a Georges Meliès movie: A trip to the moon https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Trip_to_the_Moon

anonZ3PbJ8FR7Xg• 2 years ago

great lets see what you've invented

janoc3• 2 years ago

I wonder how is that pertinent to the argument I am making?

Or calling out click-bait and hype now requires filed patents and other "inventor" credentials?

FYI, I have 20+ years research and commercial experience developing virtual reality solutions, including published papers in scientific journals. Unlike patents and far-fetched ideas left for others to sort out, journal papers actually require results to be demonstrated and undergo peer review.

Does that qualify, Mr throwaway account?

fennecbutt• 2 years ago

Welcome to our patent system.

urbandw311er2• 2 years ago

It makes me sad he can’t be here to try out something like Vision Pro and see the evolution of this concept 50 years on. I imagine you’d struggle to wipe the smile off his face.

nottorp4• 2 years ago

Neural networks were 'invented' in the 1960s-70s too. We only have the hardware to get something semi useful* out of them ... now.

* actually they have been used before, but they didn't manage to generate religious like fanaticism until the past few years.

yaky• 2 years ago

Speaking of old(er) VR, I recall trying to play Duke Nukem 3D in a VR helmet and a joystick with 3 buttons. It had to be early 2000s, probably at some tech show.

crispyambulance• 2 years ago

OK, but it seems to me that, even now, the market isn't exactly crazy about VR googles. They're expensive and the novelty of them is fleeting (haven't tried the Apple ones).

DrBazza• 2 years ago

Anecdote - I remember as child in the UK, in the 1980s, there was a full sized lorry that toured, carrying a Harrier jump-jet VR set up. The graphics were wireframe, possibly 8 colour, I'm not sure, but I do remember the VR helmet. It was two small CRT TVs suspended from the roof by cables, and you sat in a chair that had to be adjusted so your head was in the helmet, not the other way around, because of the weight.

All that aside, the thing actually worked - you could turn your head and the display updated and you could fly around. Remarkable for the time.

A man who invented VR goggles 50 years too soon (2016)

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