VIRTUAL REALITY, ONE YEAR OUT: What went right, what didn’t
Players enjoy a VR experience at HTC’s Viveland arcade in Taiwan.
AFTER YEARS OF TEASES, tantalizing promises, and Kickstarter campaigns, virtual reality finally became actual reality in 2016, with VR’s mere existence thrusting the entire PC industry into glorious, wonderful turmoil. Despite being around for just a handful of months, virtual reality has already inspired totally new genres of computers, wormed its way deep into Windows, and sent the price of graphics cards plummeting.
Not too shabby for VR’s first real year on the streets, though the implementations could still use some fine-tuning. Let’s look back at how this wild new frontier blossomed in 2016.
The birth of consumer virtual reality
From the very start of 2016 it was clear that the dawn of proper PC-powered VR had arrived. You could see evidence of this fact all over CES 2016 () in January, where EVGA introduced a specialized graphics card designed to fit VR headset); and seemingly every booth boasted some sort of virtual-reality hook, from VR treadmills () to VR porn () and VR Everest climbs () (the latter two being mind-blowing in their own ways).
