Wasnâ(TM)t that Commander Keen? With the futuristic blaster and the obese gorillas throwing fireballs from behind bars?

Imagine a Beowulf..... ah, fuck it. I'm too old for this crap.

Soma for the Epsilons was Brave New World.

The future of VR? I don't know. As for the current crop of VR-equipment, they're generation 1 after all. I'm not sure if VR will survive the coming years.
My first contact with VR was on Google's Cardboard (on a plastic&metal headset, not a cardboard one) Experience there did no go beyond a novelty as in "Hey, this is pretty cool!" Lanterns for Google Cardboard was pretty relaxing.
I did go out and got me a Gear VR (the black and white one) when I got my company issued Galaxy S6 Later, I upgraded to a new Gear for my USB-C equipped S8. While on S6, I could play for 10-15 minutes before overheating, this issue has gone completely on my S8.
I must say, from the beginning I was pretty impressed with the Gear VR and played with it for a good 2 years. Now it only gets some occasional use. It is still a great piece of equipment for demoing however. (having no need for cables or PC certainly helps) People who see VR for the first time just love it. They don't run out however to buy a Vive or a Rift.(or PSVR, or Windows MR or Google Daydream or even Oculus Go)
Some years ago, during the DK1 and DK2 period, I was going to buy one the moment it came out so when my PC died I bought a i7 equipped with a GForce GTX 980. The price of the Rift at launch however put those plans to rest. The price of the Vive killed them. Now that they have come down in price (€450 for a Rift with Touch controllers) I'm kinda interested again but am torn between a good set of Windows MR goggles and a Rift, mainly because the resolution.
So, we're now end 2018. What does the future hold? The Rift and the Vive are getting long in the tooth and never really got any real traction. The success of the PS4 console and the wealth of AAA outfits familiar with programming for it seems to have pushed the PSVR in the winner slot although spec wise, it comes up somewhat short. Gear VR quality can now be had for cheap in form of the Oculus Go. Google's Daydream never seems to have taken off and neither did the Google-inspired Focus. Oculus Quest, which will not come out for several months has some advantages over Rift/Vive but also some serious disadvantages (it is quite a bit less powerful than the 'real' VR headsets.). Unless some breakthroughs are realized in the next 2 years it is quite possible that no major manufacturer will be willing to jump in and VR will (again) disappear from view. That would be sad....

Something I have not seen mentioned is the use of VR in combination with fitness equipment.
Currently, a typical fitness room has a bunch bikes, some treadmills for running, some rowing apparatus a few stepping machines and the like. Doing exercise on those is pretty much a solitary and boring activity.
How nice would it not be to have VR-enabled fitness equipment where you could bike/run in a nice virtual environment with the speed you're pedaling/running having an effect on the speed you move through the virtual world, where you could row on a virtual river and hear the oars hit the water, see birds, butterflies and fish all around your in a beautifull nature setting, where the stepping machines would let you climb crumbling medieval towers so that you get a nice outside view every x steps and so on.
All the while you would be able to optionally see your speed, calories burnt etc floating in front above you
You could even add some more adrenaline-pumping experiences where every now and then you get chased by a bear or a wolfpack or whatever to do your minute of cardio workout...
Just like the mentioned arcades, this would move the high cost of the VR equipment to a centralised place shared by a lot of people and would give people an incentive to work out (well, it woud give me an incentive to work out.)
I'd go train there....

As has been noted, this video is TWO YEARS OLD, while there is a much more recent redirected walking" article available using a much more advanced teechnique....

It seems to be about goalposts and definitions. One could have the same discussion with "Does peg legged Pete have an artificial leg?" Some would say "Yeah, sure. Artificial leg." Others would say" No way. It's just a piece of wood, driftwood even, that he uses to hobble around on. An artificial leg is something else" and they would keep saying that even after we'd have the "six-million dollar man" legs. Same with artificial life. Is it life, but not really, just a good approximation because it is "artificial". Or is it "life" that did not arrise through the ongoing natural evolution process. When talking A.I, we're not talking artificial humans or even "general artifical intelligence" (whatever that would be) but something that gives the impression that the thing on the other side (of the screen, the board, the table, the whatever) is intelligent. For the champion Go player, if he was to play against AlphaGo without knowing so, he would not be able to tell if he was playing a human or a machine. So, AlphaGo, in that incarnation ( it can learned to a totally different skillset) is real A.I for Go in a sort of successfull but limited Turing test. Same for Big Blue for an even more limited chess Turin test. Now that we know Big Blue can beat world champions and AlphaGo can beat human Go champions, we kinda say, meh, yeah, we know it's better than humans but it's not real A.I. Things will progress piecemeal in this fashion untill we have natural conversations with our digital assistants (on phones? Tablets? Robots?) knowing that they are not real humans but acting as if they were. And still people will say "Yeah, but that's not real A.I"

Got me a cheap plastic Archos VR viewer with headband (â26 tax&shipping included), loaded some apps on my 2-year old Note3 and came away pretty impressed. There definitely is some nice stuff floating around on Cardboard (Lanterns, Seaworld VR2, Titans of Space, Deep Space VR and so on) . Then Samsung launched their consumer Gear VR for a measely â100 at about the same time my company phone came up for renewal. My interests having been raised, I immediately opted for the Samsung S6 even though the LG G4 seemed a better phone. So now I'm a blown away Gear VR user. I never was a real Gamer. Todays games just take too long for me so the type of games on the Gear (small, short and simple) being closer to mobile games really got to me. Marine Rift, Bravo Six, Gunjack are just awsome, even without positional tracking. And that is just on a memory constrained, mobile device! So yes, the moment Oculus Rift comes out, I'll be getting one. (Ok, I just might wait to see what the Vive brings to the table...) Luckily I should already have a suitable PC (i7, Nvidia 980) So there, one happy and impressed VR user right here. (we seem to be in the minority...) As for the future of VR, with everything that is coming out in the near future (like the Gear look-alike from China which will take any phone, not just Samsung), I have a pretty optimistical view for VR as an entirely new gaming/experience/documentary environment (although the article's one year prognosis should better be spread out over 5 years...)

Ok. So it's going to be more than $350. Personally, I found it a pretty low price to start with. Now the question is how much more? $400? $500? $750? Everything up to $500 would be ok, I guess. If you are willing to spend $350, then $500 isn't a real dealbreaker. Anything more than that and it's a different ball game. Of course, there is always the HTC Vive ( Playstation VR as well, but I'm not a console person.) so we can always see what those will cost. As for games, enough people have said that sims will be very nice with this ( Space, car, plane,...) it's a best fit were games are concerned. Some immersive horror games à la Alien: Isolation will work as well. But nothing with harsh, sudden movement like the FPSes we know today. I'm sure they'll come up with some variation of it though... For me, immersive landscapes would be nice as well. Something like the aquarium simulators, but you're sitting right in them. Oceans, lakes, great Barrier Reef, but also a pleasing meadow. You're sitting by the tree line, there are rabbits playing around your feet, squirels coming up to you, some deer pass a couple of dozen feet from where you are, a bear lumbers towards you, has a sniff and crashes in the underbrush behind you etc. Old peoples homes would be ideal for those experiences. Same with guided tours of famous places. More Grand Canyon than the Louvre because detail will be less then current crop of games at the start. And that is just the first version. Once we get a kinect-like camera on it so our hands/arms/bodies will be imported in the game at the same time enabling a form of AR, once we go wireless, higher resolution, eye-tracking for better detail i'm pretty confident ( well, ok, I hope....) that in 5 years we won't be able to imagine entertainment/ infotainment/edutainment without it.

SHAFT won and he did all the tasks walking BACKWARD!! How cool is that!

Last remark of Eben is very important, I think. When you're finished playing with the matrix effect ( and yes, they should really think of photographing something more dynamic - people jumping, water splashing, fireworks, etc) you simply store that wooden frame and build the 3d people scanner (I would love to have a 3d print of my daughter, my wife,...). Finished with that? Store the wooden frame next to the first one and come up with something else to do with your 48 Raspberry Pies. After all, each of them is a full-fledged, if somewhat underpowered, PC.

Beginning of the end for Apple as a fashion statement.

Yes, Disney was the artist of both characters, but That is immaterial. (I mean, who gives a f*ck about the artist when money is involved) The point is that Oswald's copyright did not belong to Disney when he created Mickey, an Oswald look-alike with round ears. So according to this, Mickey is clearly a rip-off of the copyrighted Oswald image and Disney should have been sued into the ground for STEALING SOMEONE ELSE'S PROPERTY!!

Indeed, the CODEA app which is LUA based is very, very nice.
Even I (BASIC programmer because I'm too lazy to learn something new), was able to make a program in that environment. The community is great as well.
However, Apple being Apple, it is restricting Codea to only let the user enter his programs manually (ok, cut-n-paste is allowed too). Codea is being forced to revert some functionality that let it load external programs based on the .codea suffix.
Pretty retarded by Apple if you ask me. I realize they do this to gain/maintain control over the applications the user can install, but their actions really rub me the wrong way.

I can find a Windows Mobile version on the site.... Any idea if there available somewhere else?