Banana Scoop

While many of you may be skeptical of this at first glance, I figured I’d share it and let you decide for yourselves. What you see above is a video detailing a very fantasy-like bit of technology that may be brought into the real world soon. I’m speaking of course about Virtual Reality headsets. Whether in movies or video games, the ability to project yourself into the game and move about as you would in every day life is astounding. While I’m fairly certain this project won’t really bring us any closer to virtual reality, I believe it is a step in the right direction. “One small step for man” and all that other inspirational stuff. Hopefully you’ll enjoy a little bit of insight as I take a break from reviewing my thinning game collection.

Warning: The following is a rant and completely my own opinion.

Now as you’ve already seen, someone out there has the grand idea to create what may be the world’s first virtual reality peripheral device. While it may not be game changing or revolutionary, it sets a standard that other companies may or may not choose to follow. Those that don’t probably won’t be affected at all if any by the change, but those that do may just get the upper leg on their competitors. Either way, I believe that everyone benefits in that the consumers get something really cool, and the developers get paid. Much more than that, however, it makes me a little happy inside knowing that the generational gap hasn’t stagnated in innovation. With the older set already giving us the internet and other awesome tech, I figure it’s time for the new generation to step up to the plate and hand us something we’ve never seen before. While this may not be, it sure as heck has my attention (along with the Google Glass project).

Above is essentially what the device would look like. Definitely what you’d get from a cheesy 90’s sci-fi television show. The devs have all the information in the video linked above, so I won’t take the time to reiterate it. Instead, I’m going to go off on a tangent and talk about what this means for the future of gaming and technology in general. For a while I figured we’d stagnated as a technological society after the shut down of NASA and the fact that all we’re getting nowadays are re-hashed touch-screen phones with the most minute of improvements. Granted, it hasn’t been all too long since we came up with haptic feedback and retina displays, but where is the groundbreaking scientific tech discovery? Where are the awesome hoverboards we were promised in Back to the Future?

I’m not saying that we’ve reached our technological plateau, I’m just wondering where all the cool technology we were hoping to have back in the 90’s went. Where are the awesome perpetual energy machines and the space ports filled with people from across the galaxy? While probably way out in the far away future, it’s a grand thing to imagine what humanity can do given the time, resources and effort. That isn’t to detract from what we already have, however. It takes a lot of stuff to get that iPhone in your hand to work. Maybe some time for curiosity’s sake some of you could check out what makes a smart phone tick. It’s a lot more than fancy hardware and hitting some buttons.

Source: Oculus Rift