NASA when they made one of the earliest VR headsets in 1985

    by HelloSlowly

    9 Comments

    1. polyploid_coded on

      This and the wearable computing MIT photo look retrofuturistic, but aren’t that far off from what modern VR sets look like. They just have gotten better at miniaturizing and product-izing.

    2. officialsanic on

      Very compact for 1985. A lot of early versions of things were take for granted nowadays are way bigger than they are now and this is only slightly bigger than the Oculus Rift.

    3. IhailtavaBanaani on

      VR gets a hype cycle every 10-20 years and then gets forgotten again when people realise it’s actually pretty clumsy for everyday use outside some niche cases.

    4. that thin screen video display wasn’t what they used in 1985. it was a < 2” mini-crt that was mounted either on a helmet or a boom.

      the glove was called the Data Glove. it didn’t have haptic feedback but it could tell the shape of your hand (fist, point, # of fingers) and it’s location.

      the lcd screen is post 1987.

      source: I worked on that project 1986-1988 at Ames Research Center. I was responsible for building the embedded system that sensed position and sent it to the imaging and sound systems.

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