In addition to producing two lots of high-resolution imagery at a much higher frame rate than usual, VR systems also need to ensure that latency is kept to a minimum, so that when you move your head and your field of view shifts accordingly, there’s no noticeable lag that way lies motion sickness. Up close, it takes an uninterrupted 90fps or better to receive seamless visual input rather than a succession of flickering, headache-inducing still images. You may not consciously notice the difference, but your optic system is a lot more sensitive than you realize. While 60fps is more than acceptable on the desktop, for VR - in which the screen isn’t a couple of feet away but right in front of your eyes - to appear smooth requires at least 90fps.
However, it turns out that your desktop frame rate simply isn’t enough. On a basic level, everything needs to be drawn twice, and delivering the best VR gaming experience requires seven times the graphics processing power of traditional games. But without a top-of-the-line GPU, delivering a great VR experience isn’t possible. As well, they’ve learned from the mistakes made by previous attempts to deliver something that lives up to expectations - and that, crucially, won’t leave us feeling nauseous. Facebook’s Oculus Rift, Valve’s Steam VR, HTC’s Vive, and Sony’s PlayStation VR are able to take advantage of all the progress made in graphics technology. 2016 will see the launch of three new VR systems, and this time around we’re pretty sure that the technology is indeed up to the task. That was then, though, and now the new generation of VR is ready to deliver on those promises. Instead, what it gave us was eyestrain, neck ache and motion sickness. VR was supposed to immerse us in glorious digital worlds, enabling us to interact with technology in new ways and experience gaming at its most intense and absorbing.
With hindsight, of course, we can see that in the mid-1990s the technology simply wasn’t up to the job of delivering on VR’s lofty promises.
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