It’s as simple as this: Without the Virtuality today’s virtual reality headsets would not exist. The Virtuality Group began life in 1985, and their systems could be found in video arcades in the early 1990s. But sadly the tech just wasn’t able to cope with the vision. The graphics were poor, the motion tracking was slow and the headset (called the “Visette”) was like having a concrete crash helmet on your head. But at the time it was the latest cutting edge tech and to own one now is to own a little bit of history.
So why did it fail? The first problem was the cost of playing, about £5 per game, and back then that was a very serious about of money, but the real problem was as arcade games become better and better looking the Virtuality gaming systems still looked like an 8-bit Atari.