Difference between revisions of "Virtual boy"

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This dissatisfaction was the impetus that caused one of the video game industry’s most successful and innovative developers to take a huge professional risk by putting his faith in a new form of perception that had not been utilized for gaming before, stereoscopic vision.
 
This dissatisfaction was the impetus that caused one of the video game industry’s most successful and innovative developers to take a huge professional risk by putting his faith in a new form of perception that had not been utilized for gaming before, stereoscopic vision.
  
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==The Virtual Boy Is Born==
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The Virtual Boy was at once a technological leap and a step backwards.
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===The Tech of the Virtual Boy: 2 becomes ===
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The principle of the Virtual Boy’s display relied on a human being’s ability to see ‘2 pictures with parallax separately with left and right eyes and fuse the two pictures in the brain to sense depth” (Patent 53).  On one level there are  background images and on the other there are objects like characters and items. When looking at these two together, there appears to be depth and a larger sense of the picture becomes clear. This was a much different approach to the visuality
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[[Image:Eye diagram.jpg|thumb|right|Diagram of how the human eyes process the information coming from the two mirror projected images.(Yokoi Patent)]]
  
  
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*Japanese advertisement for Virtual Boy http://www.pockett.net/jeu_video/Virtual%20Boy/Dossier/Virtual%20Boy%20Jap. jpg
 
*Japanese advertisement for Virtual Boy http://www.pockett.net/jeu_video/Virtual%20Boy/Dossier/Virtual%20Boy%20Jap. jpg
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*Yokoi et al. STEREOSCOPIC IMAGE DISPLAY DEVICE AND STORAGE DEVICE USED THEREWITH. Nintendo Co., Ltd., assignee. Patent 5,682,171. 1997

Revision as of 03:41, 5 November 2008

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Japanese advertisement for the Virtual Boy

The Virtual Boy was a virtual reality, 3-dimensional gaming device made by Nintendo and was in retail between 1995 and 1996. It is widely believed to be Nintendo’s only glaring failure in its history. But the story of the Virtual Boy is the tale of one visionary who tried to alter the course of an entire industry. He failed due to the conservative nature of the games industry, as well as the American public’s reluctance to take a risk accepting a radically different new technology. It also exposed how perfection driven the Japanese business model is (in terms of how the backlash of the Virtual Boy’s failure affected its creator). And finally, the Virtual Boy stands as a great example of a ‘what if?’ moment in history, where we were presented with a potential new lineage of entertainment enjoyed through true virtual space instead of just at a flat, distant screen.

Background:

In the mid 1990’s, the US console market was in transition between 2-dimensional, sprite based graphics and 3-dimensional, polygonal graphics. At the same time the portable gaming market was still based on monochromatic displays popularized by the dominant portable gaming device, the Game Boy (Kent 513). There had been little variety outside of the traditional flat, depthless display. But that was about to change with the partnership of Reflections Technology, a company from Massachusetts that invented mirror scanning stereoscopic displays (capable of creating the illusion of 3 dimensions) and an innovative hardware designer, Nintendo’s Gumpei Yokoi (Kent 513).


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Gunpei Yokoi, inventor of both Nintendo's greatest success, Game Boy, and its greatest flop, Virtual Boy.(EGM)

Gumpei Yokoi: The King of Portable Consoles

Starting off overseeing the assembly line machines that made playing cards at Nintendo, which in 1965 was still just in the playing card business, Yokoi eventually began designing toys in 1970. His first invention was a wooden device that could grasp things at a distance, it was called the ‘Ultra Hand’. (Pollack) . He eventually moved on to design electronic games for the company, specializing in portable games. His milestones included: Game & Watch (1980), a calculator sized liquid crystal display portable video game system with a built in clock; Game Boy (1989), the most successful game system of all time (100 million units sold), which was capable of reading different games off of cartridges instead of having a predetermined amount of content stored on an internal hard drive (Kent 330). By the mid 1990’s Yokoi had developed an excellent reputation at Nintendo. It seemed like he could do no wrong.

Market Saturation

By the mid 1990’s, Yokoi was dissatisfied with the lack of creativity in the market: “I saw that the market had become was so saturated with videogames that it became nearly impossible to create anything new. There were a lot of creative ideas for games for the NES and for Game Boy. But there were not so many new ideas for games for the Super Nintendo. I think game companies ran out of new ideas. I wanted to create a new kind of game that was not a video game, so that designers could come up with new ideas” (Kent 514).

This dissatisfaction was the impetus that caused one of the video game industry’s most successful and innovative developers to take a huge professional risk by putting his faith in a new form of perception that had not been utilized for gaming before, stereoscopic vision.

The Virtual Boy Is Born

The Virtual Boy was at once a technological leap and a step backwards.

The Tech of the Virtual Boy: 2 becomes

The principle of the Virtual Boy’s display relied on a human being’s ability to see ‘2 pictures with parallax separately with left and right eyes and fuse the two pictures in the brain to sense depth” (Patent 53). On one level there are background images and on the other there are objects like characters and items. When looking at these two together, there appears to be depth and a larger sense of the picture becomes clear. This was a much different approach to the visuality


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Diagram of how the human eyes process the information coming from the two mirror projected images.(Yokoi Patent)


Bibliography

  • Kent, Steven L. The Ultimate History of Video Games: From Pong to Pokemon--The Story Behind the Craze That Touched Our Lives and Changed the World
  • Pollack, Andrew. “Gunpei Yokoi, Chief Designer Of Game Boy, Is Dead at 56;Obituary (Obit)” New York Times. (Late Edition (East Coast)). New York, N.Y.: Oct 9, 1997. pg. D.22
  • Yokoi et al. STEREOSCOPIC IMAGE DISPLAY DEVICE AND STORAGE DEVICE USED THEREWITH. Nintendo Co., Ltd., assignee. Patent 5,682,171. 1997