Video: A Modern Take on the Virtual Boy is Still a Bit Ridiculous

Eh...looks terrible.

Virtual Boy is the granddad of all these VR sets today

People walk around with it, then they take it off, pass out from the headache it gave, sees a red traffic light, follows it...BAM!!!! The virtual boy was a fresh idea, but it had too many problems. Nintendo basically forgot about it (actually kept it in the closet and out of existence). I love nintendo, but this was not something that should have come out when it did. I only imagine the possibilities if nintendo re-created something like this for the present day consumer...could be marvelous! Just the imagery was horrible...I played it in the stores, and it was hard to see, but backing away from it after a few minutes, especially backing away in store lights, was very painful. Glad nintendo did take it away, before lawsuits started to form around it.

Why don't we have a Wario Land VB enhanced port on the 3DS? Easy way to print money.

@Xaessya VR existed before Virtual Boy.. so the VB is more like a cousin than a grandfather

@ThomasBW84 I don't feel that these modern "VR'" headsets are really virtual reality gaming either. More like a 360 degree perspective. Virtual Reality is when you are completely immersed in the world, your movements are tracked and recreated. At the moment games are played in a 360 degree perspective and space where our movements are still controlled by a controller and actions performed by button presses. This is no more virtual reality than what the virtual boy offered, albeit in a much more advanced and beautiful manner, simply added the 360 degree perspective.

The Virtual Boy was a disaster, but it gave Nintendo the basis of their research for the 3DS, so not everything was lost!

naM lautriV

Pretty neat tho even if it doesn't look too good.

@Savlep99 "More like a 360 degree perspective. Virtual Reality is when you are completely immersed in the world, your movements are tracked and recreated. At the moment games are played in a 360 degree perspective and space where our movements are still controlled by a controller and actions performed by button presses."

Although I would agree that having to use a controller does take away from the experience and more or less breaks the immersion, you really can't put the Virtual Boy and modern day VR on the same level, since the tech is entirely different.

Virtual Boy is, like already mentioned by @ThomasBW84 more a predecessor of the 3DS and only has one viewpoint, and that is a simple stereoscopic view of what are actually 2D games. Turning your head in unison with the device in game will do absolutely nothing to change the experience, other than you having to awkwardly hold it, since it wasn't meant for that purpose.

And movements actually ARE tracked and recreated, to which degree that goes depending on which head set you are using in combination with what peripherals. There are VR gloves, treadmills, weapons etc., so as long as money isn't an issue, you can make it as realistic as you want.

" This is no more virtual reality than what the virtual boy offered, albeit in a much more advanced and beautiful manner, simply added the 360 degree perspective."

Current VR head sets do NOT just add 360 perspective, if we're talking about looking around on a horizontal plane. There's also up and down, which makes for another 360 degrees, but on a vertical plane. And then there is simulated manipulation and with help of gimmicks like the special Oculus Touch controllers and technologies like haptic feedback, it's so much more than just a prettier picture.

And in the near future, there's going to be even more advanced haptic feedback that will add texture and weight to objects that you can touch and manipulate in-game.

We already have a contemporary equivalent to this clunky, overpriced, game-deprived and headache-inducing exercise in redundancy in the Xbox family.

What makes the Virtual Boy not a VR device? Look at Teleroboxer; it was going for a first person virtual experience, where your vision was encapsulated by the screen. Motion headtracking doesn't mean VR, because there are plenty of modern VR games that don't do that, and still classified as VR games.

There is one thing that NEEDS to be taken from the Virtual boy, the graphics hardware. I don't mean the GPU I mean the line of LED's and the spinning mirror that acted as a screen, the whole limiting factor back then was that LEDs were expensive and they didn't want to make their own.
Now LED's are cheap and having just two lines of LED's to make a VR headset screen would be INCREDIBLE for keeping costs down. Any headset that could use the screen tech in the virtual boy successfully would blow all the other VR headsets out of the water.

@Braneman "Now LED's are cheap and having just two lines of LED's to make a VR headset screen would be INCREDIBLE for keeping costs down. Any headset that could use the screen tech in the virtual boy successfully would blow all the other VR headsets out of the water."

That's kind of an interesting idea, actually.