Defying Reality: The Inside Story of the Virtual Reality Revolution by David M. Ewalt

Author:David M. Ewalt
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Business & Economics, Computers, Entrepreneurship, Inventions, Technology & Engineering, Virtual Worlds
Publisher: Blue Rider Press
Published: 2018-07-12T03:00:00+00:00

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It’s hard to resist pretending to be Hunter S. Thompson when you’re a reporter chasing a story to Las Vegas. Then you realize you’re on an air-conditioned monorail to gadget central, not a savage journey to the heart of the American dream. The Consumer Electronics Show takes over the city. The billboards promote Chinese contract manufacturing companies instead of casino stage shows, and when a stranger hands you a flyer, it’s as likely to say “visit us at booth 79450” as “girls, girls, girls.”

Since 1967, the Consumer Technology Association’s annual trade show had become the go-to event for companies trying to sell their new products to retailers and the media. In previous years, exhibitors debuted groundbreaking consumer technologies, including videocassette recorders, camcorders, compact disc players, and high-definition TVs. This year, VR was the must-see technology.

Official CES marketing materials breathlessly explained that because of “the fast growth of virtual reality,” organizers had increased the square footage of the Gaming and Virtual Reality Marketplace by 77 percent over the year before, and more than forty exhibitors would be there, including Oculus, Sony, and HTC. Before the show even started, news outlets like The Guardian and USA Today were already proclaiming CES 2016 “the year of VR.”

Even members of the world’s oldest profession were in on the hype. A few days before the show began, I received a press release from Sheri’s Ranch, one of Nevada’s legal brothels, announcing that while they enjoyed an annual surge in business from CES attendees, management was “bracing against” the growth of virtual reality because the convenience of simulated sexual satisfaction “threatens the Ranch’s customer flow.” Fortunately, the release went on to explain, “courtesan” Red Diamonds remained confident that “virtual reality couldn’t teach a man what I could teach him.”

Of course, CES hype doesn’t always bear fruit. In 1995, Newsweek magazine wrote that “virtual reality is finally coming to the living room” after trying four different headsets at the show; unfortunately, the most successful of them was Nintendo’s ill-fated Virtual Boy, and that was discontinued in the United States after less than six months. Then there was the CES I’d attended back in 2009, when 3-D televisions were supposed to, yes, finally come into the living room: I have fond memories of Sony chief executive Howard Stringer’s keynote address and his bringing actor Tom Hanks onstage to show off the company’s wonky-looking plastic 3-D glasses. Hanks wisely kept himself above the hype with a naughty-child routine, reading marketing text off the teleprompter in a comical monotone and sniping at the product. “Oh, look, they’re so cool and hip . . . I think these are the best glasses Sony’s ever made,” he deadpanned. By 2015, just 9 percent of US households owned TVs with 3-D capability, and by January 2017 all the major manufacturers had dropped the feature from their new models.

But even if virtual reality didn’t have a winning record in Vegas, at least this time around it looked like a high roller. My

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