Most head mounted VR gear brings me back to my teenage years, where my orthodontist tried to make me wear a night brace to straighten my teeth.

It works while you sleep, he said.

You try sleeping with your head in a vice, I said.

He didn’t care. He got paid $40/month regardless of how long it took. Needless to say, I soon got a new orthodontist. And I’ve kept trying on various VR gear too.

I originally favored the CAVE projection kind of display and built a few variations of my own, including a six-sided one at Disney. The main benefit is zero latency (ignoring stereo parallax changes) — in other words, the image is already there when you turn your head. No blurriness. The main downside, of course, is who has room or money for an 8′ cube in their living room. Not practical until we get digital wallpaper or big flexible roll-up screens.

But even still, I happily bought into the Oculus Rift’s kickstarter, eager to try again. I love seeing people so enthusiastic about this stuff, especially new blood.

Though I’ve personally used the Rift for many minutes at a time, my own purchased dev kit is still sitting in its box, alas, waiting for me to find time to build something useful. The head-tracking latency was actually very good, but the original display felt much like the world was made of LiteBrite. If you’ve never tried it, here’s a good oculus rift simulator to try.

I just pre-ordered the 2nd gen dev kit too, which fixes much of the resolution issue, and I’m sure comes in an even nicer box.

I’m hopeful that Carmack can solve some of the rendering latency issues that fast OLED displays alone can’t. I did some research in this area too, fwiw. There’s a lot that can still be done to wring the delays out of various pipelines.

Some friends and I also got to try out the new Sony Morpheus HMD at GDC this week. We had to get in line the moment the expo doors opened, just to get a ticket to stand in line to wait to try. But it was worth it, I keep telling myself.

The resolution was impressive. The persistence of their LCD displays was not as good as the Rift’s. Now, I can’t be sure what they’re using inside, but I would have thought they’d throw some 4k SXRD panels in there, just like they use in their nicest projectors.

I thought those were akin to DLP in terms of super-fast switching time, but I’m not so sure anymore. Maybe there isn’t room for front-reflection in the optical path. I can say that the LCD-like images we saw seemed to be over-driven and washed out a bit, mostly suffering from slow switching times. Brightness was great, but black blacks were in short supply.

In any event, no one got nauseated, which is a small victory for those of us who can’t watch the Blair Witch Project without dramamine. The Rift also does well on that front. But in both cases, using a simple laptop trackpad or arrow keys to navigate puts me back on the vomit comet.

A nice omni-directional treadmill might do the trick. Someone had one of those on display too, but I didn’t get to try it — seems to need special slippery shoes. But if we’re going through the trouble of a 4′ treadmill, why not just go back to using CAVEs? If it’s just a matter of integrating your furniture, my friends in MSR solved that nicely.

For what it’s worth, I still have my money on real see-through AR displays as the ultimate winner. Let me walk in the real world, augmented with new content. Yes, indeed.