You can't compare the Glyph, who lets you watch a screen floating in front of you, with the 110 FOV Rift, who places you virtually inside the content. Positional tracking in not that important if all you'll be doing is turning around this or that way, while seated at a chair. Can you imagine having a 360 3D live video being broadcast from a court seat in an NBA game, or a tennis or football match, with all the notions of scale and depth you get with real 3D? This will be a huge thing with sports and other content that benefits from the sense of presence you'll get.
Here's a link showing some people who are developing tech to stream live VR sports
And your point is? Are you saying that because it didn't become a success in the 90's it is a failed concept?
The card I have in my computer now, is many times more powerful than an $250k Silicon Graphics Onyx that you had back then. The displays you had back then were crap and had very low resolution. The latency you had in tracking was nauseating and full of errors. Not to mention the huge weight of the "helmet".
Compare that to:
- 1920x1080 resolution OLED with low persistency
- Low latency 1:1 positional tracking
- ~20ms motion to photon latency
- High end PC GPU's capable of rendering realistic graphics at real time >60fps
- ~200 grams of weight and comfortable as the average ski goggles
- $300 price tag
It is so tiresome hearing people who never tried the Rift say it's hype and a gimmick based on 20 year old attempts at the technology.
"Most of the problem is artistic, not technological."
That's the whole problem, and what people are trying to fix.
As long as games need to rely on expensive and talented artists or expensive motion capture to do human character animation, the production costs of games will continue to go up and up as games get more realistic, not to mention the all the limitations imposed by such methods. It's only when algorithms and software are fully able to imitate in a realistic the way humans look and move, that we will be able to see a significant drop in productions costs and a gigantic leap in gameplay and interaction potential with human characters in games.
10x more exiting ~~then~~ than building the next graphics engine
Sieg Heil!
And it should be the law: If you use the word `paradigm' without knowing what the dictionary says it means, you go to jail. No exceptions. -- David Jones