Two people demonstrating the VPL Eyephone goggles at the Texpo Telecommunications Show in San Francisco June 7, 1989
The VPL Eyephone, developed in the late 90s, was the first commercially marketed Virtual Reality goggles. This photo holds evidentiary value because it provides a visual representation of how the VR is worn and used. The general design and use of the headset is not very different from that of today's commercial VR goggles such as the Occulus Rift.
On our disappointment with technology - "I wonder if the reason we keep on cycling back to hope about cool things like VR is that for all the tech news and our fetishizing about our touch devices, we’re still a little disappointed in the menu of tech items that we have at this late date. It’s 2014 and you can buy a robot to clean your house, but it doesn’t really work that well yet. We all think it will, some day, but it’s not quite there. We have some demos of cars that drive themselves but you can’t really buy one. Everything is kind of taking so long. So I feel like, in a way, we keep on cycling through the same tech hope stories because there’s an impatience and frustration. We wait until we’ve forgotten one of them, then we rediscover it. So I think there’s a little bit of that going on." - Jaron Lanier
Two people demonstrating the VPL Eyephone goggles at the Texpo Telecommunications Show in San Francisco June 7, 1989
The VPL Eyephone, developed in the late 90s, was the first commercially marketed Virtual Reality goggles. This photo holds evidentiary value because it provides a visual representation of how the VR is worn and used. The general design and use of the headset is not very different from that of today's commercial VR goggles such as the Occulus Rift.
On our disappointment with technology - "I wonder if the reason we keep on cycling back to hope about cool things like VR is that for all the tech news and our fetishizing about our touch devices, we’re still a little disappointed in the menu of tech items that we have at this late date. It’s 2014 and you can buy a robot to clean your house, but it doesn’t really work that well yet. We all think it will, some day, but it’s not quite there. We have some demos of cars that drive themselves but you can’t really buy one. Everything is kind of taking so long. So I feel like, in a way, we keep on cycling through the same tech hope stories because there’s an impatience and frustration. We wait until we’ve forgotten one of them, then we rediscover it. So I think there’s a little bit of that going on." - Jaron Lanier
Newton, Casey. "The Rise and Fall and Rise of Virtual Reality." The Verge. 1 Jan. 2014. Web. 6 Apr. 2015. <http://www.theverge.com/a/virtual-reality/interview#interview>.