When I picked up the Sunday NY Times in my driveway on November 7, 2015, I believed the world was about to change. That morning, the Times, in partnership with Google, distributed 1.3 million Cardboard VR headsets. A generation of people would be exposed to VR and the world would never be the same.
Between 2020 and 2022, Meta/Facebook has sold 15 million Quest 2 headsets. We are square in the middle of a new generation of VR usage. (We have 3 Quest 2 headsets in our house.)
This upsurge of interest in virtual reality has me nostalgic for my time in the first VR wave, back in the 1990s (technically, this might have been the second or third wave) but when I started to research on the web, you would see names like Jaron Lanier, Ivan Sutherland, John Carmack and even the Nintendo Virtual Boy, I was upset that the articles din’t mention my corner of the universe (Sense8, Gemini, etc.)
Here are some of those histories:
- https://mixed-news.com/en/the-history-of-virtual-reality/
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virtual_reality
- https://www.vrs.org.uk/virtual-reality/history.html
I realized that a good reason these stories didn’t cover Sense8 and Gemini was that there are very few artifacts available on the web. No images. No videos. No stories. So the goal of this blog is to rectify that situation. I found a collection of old DVD with source code, executables, demos and notes. I am going to cull through this info a post what I remember…and what ever I can actually run on computer 25 years in the future.
