Seven Failed Virtual Reality Technologies
Stephen Goldmeier, io9.com: There was a time when people were calling home virtual reality the wave of the future. Now most people just call it goofy and expensive. Here are 7 virtual reality technologies that didn’t work, and never will.
The Virtual Reality Glove: It seemed every time Nintendo dug into the virtual reality market, they miscalculated. You may remember the Power Glove from such cinema classics as The Wizard. The Power Glove recreated the motions of a user wearing it on screen, but the motion tracking was imprecise and the glove was clunky. The company sold about 100,000 of the gloves in the U.S. Compare that with a more successful technology descended from the Power Glove, the Wii; Nintendo has sold over 13 million of those so far.
That didn’t stop other companies from trying to market similar technologies, though. The P5 glove for PC gaming required specially designed games and therefore never caught on and the CyberGlove proved too expensive for home use. As a result, the era of virtual reality gloves quietly ended.
