PS: Sim World?

Either way, thanks for sharing this, it really is an exciting time as some of these ideas finally reach fruition and manifest themselves in ways that may have been unimaginable just a few years ago!

Thanks for your comments! I don’t think anyone was ever delusional, although I have a funny memory of getting the (then) US Senate Majority Leader extremely nauseated. This was back in our labs in Glendale, before we deployed anything, on a day when the controls weren’t working. Short-notice demo — you should always have a backup plan, which we didn’t. So I had to improvise and use a mouse to copy what he was trying to do with the handlebars as quickly and accurately as I could. I don’t think he knew, but it was very laggy, and so he turned green. A few people did get sick on the actual ride, but not more than for a good rollercoaster, afaik. Some people get sick on park benches.

More people had to deal with the cognitive overloading in the world and just had a hard time adapting.

Anyway, the main reason it wasn’t commercialized was the cost and logistics. As far as Disney rides go, they tend to be very expensive. But you have to look at the throughput to make it up. For VR, it took 5 minutes to on-board each guest plus a 5 minute ride @ 500k/seat (not including the HMD and motion base, which we left off). That’s less than a hundred people a day per seat, vs. many thousands for a rollercoaster. DisneyQuest tried it on a cheaper and smaller basis, with smaller PCs, etc.. but they had some issues to contend with.

Also, keep in mind, while the HMD worked great, it was so heavy it required weight relief cables from the ceiling, which makes it not good for use in your home, for example. And the weight still added a lot of inertia to head motions, even under full relief. The Disney*Vision HMD also had very low effective latency, since it used CRTs and wired sensors and SGI added some custom extensions to fix latency in their pipeline.

I’m definitely looking forward to the Oculus Rift to see something cheap, light, bright, and wide FOV finally.

Avi

As I was 12 years old, I was one of the kids who had experienced the Aladdin VR. I was picked from the “Aladdin VR Tour” line and it was one of the most incredible experiences I have ever had.
From a young age I was a fond of 3D graphics and it enchanted me. I even remember the “programmer in his natural environment” and believe it or not, I even knew, being 12 years old, what Silicon Graphics was.
After a decade later, I went again to Epcot, and couldn’t find any VR of any kind there. That was really disappointing.
Now I am an engineer and Co-Founder of an AR company, specializing in 3D graphics.
I was wondering why this project was stopped and why VR had not yet made it to the mainstream? In addition, if you had such good HMD two decades ago, why this hadn’t gone to mass market yet?
I heard some answers to that are that people starting being delusional after being immersed in VR, have you experienced any of these back then?

Would appreciate your reply,

Thank you,
Nir