The '9s is back, baby. Time to grab some Crystal Pepsi on ice, toss a tray of
bagel bites into the oven, and kick back and enjoy some cutting edge virtual
reality. No, that that's not a joke. Consumer VR
is yet another modern trend that owes its popularity, at least in part, to the
'90s. It was in our arcades, our theme parks, our movies, TV shows. So, of
course, it made its way into our video games. And okay, yeah, those of you old
enough to remember Nintendo's Virtual Boy will probably say that that barely
counts as VR. And Sega's offering only got as far as a demo at CES before Sega
pulled the chute, claiming that it was too realistic for public consumption.
But over on the PC side of things, we had numerous options for relatively
affordable VR. Virtual IO's eyeglasses,
Victor Max's Cybermax, and this, the
VFX1 headgear from Forte, which came out
disappointingly just 6 days after Christmas in 1994.
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This old tower here runs Windows 95 like an absolute stud. But the thing is,
we're not playing full tilt pinball here. So, we're going to bail on nice to
haves like a graphical user interface and run our games a little closer to the
metal using MS DOS 7. After navigating
to the install directory, which delightfully I was still able to do
somehow, uh, I just need to open up set VFX1.exe
and oh wow, 3D graphics. I've been told
that I'm going to stay seated for most of this demonstration because otherwise
I might throw up on set.
You can move the ear cups in to uh to have it put on easier. The visor
obviously flips up and down. The IPD is adjustable just by moving the lenses in
and out manually. >> And then you've got individual focus
control as well. >> Wow, look at that. >> I did find to get the right focus, you
did need to have the optics really close to your eye sockets.
>> Dude, us '90s kids were so much harder. We didn't need like cloth or rubber
gaskets on things that sat right next to our eyes. We liked hard plastic.
>> So, you've got it in focus there. Yeah, I've even got a little bit of 3D effect.
It seems like the screen is bulging out towards me, which was the fashion at the
time. Conveniently, it doesn't seal very well. So, I can just see my keyboard
under me. >> So, go to F3, which is test VFX1. And this is going to be the headset side.
>> Oh, yeah. Look at that. With only a marginal delay.
>> So, the next piece is the cyber puck. So, it just goes forward and back and
then side to side. And then you've got three buttons that your fingers kind of
align on there. >> Oh, there you go. >> Okay. So, it rotates and twists.
>> Yes. >> But has no awareness of like a side to
side or forward and back movement. Okay. >> So, it will only go to the 90°.
>> Okay. Got it. It's all 90s all the time, baby. Time to play some Quake.
>> Yeah. >> Yeah. >> Oh, wow. This must have been a nightmare. It supports only specific
updates for Quake. >> Yep. And depending on the application,
support was either like an exe that kind
of intercepts things and read as controls or as rudimentary as just a
control map. If you want to click on single player and new game, this will
drop you into the intro spot where you actually pick your difficulty by going
through one of these hallways. So turning you tilt to the left.
>> Whoa, there, Nelly. >> And then you can move forward and back
by tilting forward and back. Your top button should be shoot.
Your middle button should be change weapon. So you have a fire axe, I
believe. And your bottom button will be jump.
>> Picking normal may have been ambitious.
>> The realism is too much. >> The reason it's so real is because Quake
was one of the few games we found that actually has stereoscopic 3D. So, you
should have the 3D effect there, >> dude. I do. It's I mean, it's not a lot,
but Oh, what the hell did I walk on, >> Rottweiler?
>> Oh, what the Oh, I didn't see it. >> Yeah, before this there was no jump.
>> You couldn't jump and boom. >> There wasn't really any look up and down either.
>> Oh, yeah. Let's go. >> That's something that you haven't tried
yet. Try looking up and down. >> Looking
buddy. Did I know Quake does that? Uh, normally
that would be like page up and page down on your keyboard.
>> Whoa, that is extremely nauseating.
>> Thus the chair. >> Wow.
>> Can you see any of the UI elements on the bottom there at all? >> Oh yeah. Yeah, I can see everything. 96
100 39. >> Nice. >> There's a Minecraft creeper. Oh god.
Looking up and down is like
You know what? The gyro aiming is actually not awful. I must look like an
idiot right now, though.
This is This is very carpal tunnel inciting.
>> Yeah. No, that was one of the things I noticed especially when I was testing
things. Your wrist gets real.
Sorry. Especially when you consider though like how small a typical screen
was in these days. like this level of immersion.
>> Oh, it was completely unheard of. A big TV was like 27 in.
>> Yeah. How do my eyes look? Cuz they feel
awful. >> And that was 5 minutes and 35 seconds.
>> You know what though? Everything from the contrast of the displays to the
immersiveness to the gyroscopic controls
legitimately feels completely nextgen incredible technology
compared to what I would have been playing, you know, with a mouse and
keyboard on a tiny CRT. However, I get
the feeling that I couldn't have afforded this. How much did this cost?
MSRP was $6.95, >> which realistically is not that far off
of what you'd pay for a cutting edge VR headset today. I'm surprised at how good
the displays are more than anything else. >> Yeah. Can you think of any other small
LCDs that would have been to that quality at that time? >> I don't think I even had ever seen an
LCD at that time. >> They had them on laptops, but they
weren't great. >> And almost nobody had those. And Oh, no.
They sucked ass. >> Yeah, they were horrible. Honestly, it
looks better than that. >> It's like playing an emulated SNES game.
Sometimes it looks better on your CRT. >> Let's try another game, shall we? I hate
that it looks so much better when I like really cram it into my eyeholes.
>> So, this one doesn't have the stereoscopic 3D, so it will look flatter
in the display. >> Yeah. >> In terms of the controls though, I
actually felt that it moved a little bit nicer.
>> How do I jump again? >> This one has no jump. >> Oh, no jump. Okay.
>> So, this is on the Doom engine, which did not have jump. I'm right under the
thing so go up. Yeah. >> Oh god.
Uh oh god.
Oh god. I'm like bouncing around.
Okay. Whoa. That was very unpleasant.
That might be enough of that one. What else we got? >> We've got one more game. We've got Descent, which is the most interesting
from the perspective where you have all of the degrees of freedom.
>> Okay. Oh man, I do not want to go back in here right now.
>> Because of the limited controls that we have, uh, auto ship leveling is turned
on, but if you whip back and forth too much, sometimes it will get disoriented
again. >> Whoa. Oh god. Oh god. Oh god. Oh my god.
This is so disorienting. So pitch up and
pitch down is pitch up and down. >> Yeah. >> Okay, I'm good so far. But then roll is
yaw, >> which uh Okay. And then my head is just
Oh, that's terrible. It moves the entire cockpit but doesn't move my aiming.
>> Yeah. >> Uhhuh. Okay.
>> This I just have my hand sit here.
It's like It's like I'm holding it out for balance or something. This is so
disorienting.
And this is where the auto ship leveling kind of failed you. Uh, now you're up
against a wall sideways.
>> Okay. Boy, did we ever make a lot of progress in the last 30 years.
>> Good job, hardware and software developers. Gee, I wonder why this
didn't take off.
Oh, and take off. It did not. We did
manage to track down more than 110 games
on its compatibility list, but only about half of them used the Cyberpuck
controller and only a couple dozen supported proper stereoscopic video. The
rest are just kind of flat but you know
ambiganted screen mode. Theoretically, Forte's VR mouse could add support to
any DOSs app with keyboard and mouse support, but that seems to have required
a bunch of manual configuration to dial things in, and Lord knows these guys
aren't going to pick up their support phone line these days. What we can do is
take a closer look at the hardware, though. That was very unpleasant.
We've already touched on the displays and lenses, but we haven't really taken
a closer look at the audio or the plastic helmet itself. For starters, as
large as it is, I'm kind of surprised it
doesn't weigh more. It's pretty wearable, especially given that it has
so many touch points around your head. Um, as for the headphones, what they
lack in, you know, adjustments, they
kind of make up for in having the world's groiniest cushions on them. And
the foam is, I think, best described as
improvised. >> Yeah, here you go. >> Oh, I see. They were improvised by us
and this is the original. >> It's seen some better days.
>> I don't know that they were that much better. This is pretty crappy. Oh god,
now it's everywhere.
>> One cool thing though is that this Velcro that we used to attach our
makeshift foam was original. So, it was designed to remove and replace, maybe to
maybe to wash it cuz they optimistically imagined you'd want to be in it for
longer than 3 minutes at a time. At the bottom, we've got what appears to be a
VGA connector, but when we open it up,
we see actually that has a lot more than
15 pins. So, this would have done display audio pass through for the puck
controller, which uses what looks like an RJ45, oh no, RJ11
connector. Good gravy. Uh, as well as
data for the gyroscopes that were built into the headset itself. The coolest
part though is actually in the tower. The VFX1 came with a proprietary ISA
card, which is the predecessor to PCI, which is the predecessor to the very
first generation of PCI Express, and we're on like what, five now for
consumer platforms. It uses Oh, no way.
It uses an FPGA. >> Yeah, >> I mean, yeah, that totally makes sense
because of course it does. So that would be a big part of why this was so
expensive. That right there is a programmable processor that would have
allowed them to hit a sort of consumer price point with acceptable performance
without being able to do the volumes to do a fully mass-produced ASIC. At the
back, we've got their proprietary interface. Again, we've got an RG11 port
for the Cyberpunk if we don't want to use the pass through. And then we've got
audio loop ports, I guess you could describe them as, to go in and out of
your sound card for the speakers and mic on the VFX1. The coolest part though is
actually this interface back here. This
is the 26 pin feature connector. And
what it enables is direct communication between the VFX1's card and the VRAMm on
our GPU at speeds that they say are up to five times faster than relying on the
ISA bus. How do we not have cool stuff
like this anymore? I mean, we do. Like Envy Link's pretty cool. It's just
enterprise only. That is so sick. And
this was a standard.
I couldn't afford a good computer back when this was current. So, like I'd
never seen this before. This interface wasn't just for RAM access. It could
also carry color info and data and sadly went away as PCI and then AGP took over
for GPUs. And also, GPUs just got a lot more integrated. It's amazing how many
of the same brands are still kicking around today, though. There's some
Samsung memory chips. SEC would love to
see it. Speaking of brands that are still around, while Forte themselves is
not, their assets were acquired by Interactive Imaging Systems, which in
turn became Vusix. I actually sat next to the product manager for some of their
headmounted displays back when I worked at NCX. So, yeah. So, they're kind of a
competitor for like um XRE. >> Yeah. >> Yeah. Crazy. On the one hand, the dream
was there and was surprisingly well realized, but it's not a huge surprise
given where the tech was that VR kind of fizzled out until the 2010s. Still, it's
shocking to me though how similar this is in its overall form and function to a
modern VR headset. And all of this was just oh, okay, 30 years ago. Oh, lordy.
I need to sit down and recover from both realizing how old I am and realizing
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