1. Virtual Reality
Launched by Nintendo in 1993, the VirtualBoy was a “virtual reality” headgear on which you could play a limited selection of games. It was an incredible idea with lousy execution. It was pricey, it looked horrible, and it made people feel nauseous. All in all, a marketing fiasco. But certainly VR would catch on one day!
If you’ve been online between 2010 or so and now you’ve heard about how VR is going to take off at any time pretty much continuously. Facebook went into this significantly with the Oculus Rift that cost them $2 billion back in 2014. Years later and data still show it’s primed to take off any moment. Globally, the VR gaming industry is valued $22.9 billion. That feels like a lot. On the other hand, the worldwide gaming business is around $150 billion, thus VR is still a minor fraction.
Is the future of VR coming? Probably? It’s hard to say since it’s looked that way for years. This is very probably an instance of a technology coming before it’s time. But the reality is that, even 30 years after the VirtualBoy debuted, VR is still not a major force in gaming.
For many years, VR was an expensive prospect. It cost thousands of dollars to acquire just a single headset. Costs are considerably lower today, but there’s greater market saturation. You may pick Oculus, PlayStation, Valve, HTC, and more. At least console gaming is still mostly just Microsoft against Sony with a little Nintendo sprinkled in for flavour.
VR equipment continues evolving, rendering old gear useless and somewhat of a dangerous purchase. As addition, many individuals simply don’t enjoy wearing a set of glasses that may become steamy and impede their vision of everything else, not to mention crushing their hair. It’s entertaining for some, but not everyone. It’s probable VR will only ever be a small market compared to regular gaming.
You need open space to play VR games and people and dogs can’t simply roam about you for fear of being whacked by mistake. This isn’t a sit and play experience. The technology isn’t nearly up to typical gaming standards yet either.
So yes, one day VR may genuinely be the next big thing, but don’t bet on it any time soon.
2. Picturephone
If you watched any sci-fi made from the 1950s through to the 1990s or so, you saw a picture phone in one form or another. It felt like the natural progression of a telephone. As radio gave way to TV, so would chatting on a phone give way to staring a someone on your view screen. Star Trek famously placed everyone on TV to speak. So when AT&T introduced the picturephone in 1964, of course, it appeared like the wave of the future.
The phone emerged for genuine in 1970 and rapidly went nowhere. The expense was simply outrageous by anyone’s standards. The service priced $160 a month in 1970 money, or roughly $1,100 adjusted for inflation. Plus a per minute cost beyond the first half hour. AT&T anticipated they’d earn one billion dollars by 1980.
They managed to sell 453 phones in Chicago and 32 in Pittsburgh by 1972.The business had been aiming for 50,000 units by 1975. They were plainly not on track.
The Picturephone failed because no one else had one. Those 32 individuals in Pittsburgh presumably didn’t all know each other, so most of the time your $1000 a month phone was simply an ordinary phone. Then there was the $1,000 a month. They ended up decreasing the cost to $75 a month, but that still amounts to over $500 with inflation.
One of the greatest concerns with Picturephone is an issue we still see today with technologies like Zoom or Skype. Most individuals don’t want to be seen on the phone. Maybe you’re in bed or in the bathroom, or simply not looking your best. You don’t want to be ready to be spotted on a call.
3. 3D TV
3D movies were a huge novelty back in the day when you had to wear those red and blue spectacles. It was never more than a novelty since it didn’t actually operate effectively, and it made the rest of the movie seem bad.
Modern 3D is a lot better. No tinted glasses, and a more seamless experience. Not everyone enjoys it, and it pays a premium to view films that way, but once Avatar came out and blew many away, it became a fixture of large Hollywood blockbusters. It was so enormous, in fact, that the 3D TV sought to profit on it. Why wait for the cinema when you could enjoy 3D at home?
A new 3D TV would cost roughly $2,000. You also need a Blu-Ray player to handle 3D movies. And then you needed the 3D spectacles. They cost roughly $100 a piece and everyone wanted a pair to watch. They also had to sit squarely in front of the TV since it didn’t operate well at angles.
Most movies aren’t filmed in 3D and others are only converted to 3D later for specific parts. So people were spending a lot in a restricted experience. All in all, not enough people loved or cared about the technology to keep it afloat with all the expenditures involved.
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