Speaker 1: Welcome to Tech Stuff, a production from iHeartRadio. Hey there,
Speaker 1: and welcome to tech Stuff. I'm your host, Jonathan Strickland.
Speaker 1: I'm an executive producer with iHeart Podcasts and how the
Speaker 1: tech are yet, y'all. I didn't really pay attention to
Speaker 1: April Fools this year, which I think of as being
Speaker 1: a little sad. So I tend to be easily amused
Speaker 1: by goofy product announcements and that kind of thing, and
Speaker 1: so I often enjoy the stuff that gets announced on
Speaker 1: April Fool's Day. However, I understand that many of my
Speaker 1: peers in the tech space are totally over it, and
Speaker 1: there's some legit criticism about it, right, like about how
Speaker 1: a lot of companies just put out stuff that isn't
Speaker 1: very funny and instead it just ends up being more
Speaker 1: misleading than it is silly. And I get it, you know,
Speaker 1: comedy is hard and some companies are just terrible at it.
Speaker 1: But one thing that I did see after the fact
Speaker 1: that got a chuckle out of me inspired this episode.
Speaker 1: So it was a video on IGN's YouTube channel that
Speaker 1: supposedly was an announcement for the launch of a new
Speaker 1: Nintendo gaming platform, namely the Virtual Boy pro. So this
Speaker 1: video shows a woman who slots essentially a Nintendo Switch
Speaker 1: handheld gaming system into a headset, and then she puts
Speaker 1: the headset on. Then we're treated to a first person
Speaker 1: perspective of supposedly her experience as her living room is transformed,
Speaker 1: you know, augmented reality style, and it turns into a
Speaker 1: gaming space, and she can you know, play games and
Speaker 1: make things run around her actual furniture, or she can
Speaker 1: place virtual cartoon furniture in her real living room, or
Speaker 1: she can transfer an anger Man into tom Nook from
Speaker 1: Animal Crossing. And at one point she actually sees Luigi
Speaker 1: challenging her to a drag race as she drives around
Speaker 1: with a switch mounted to her face, which is a
Speaker 1: funny gag and also terrifying. It makes me think of
Speaker 1: all those videos of people walking around with the Apple
Speaker 1: headset on, and I'm thinking, just don't do that where
Speaker 1: folks can see you. Anyway. It also reminded me that
Speaker 1: while I have mentioned the Virtual Boy in past episodes,
Speaker 1: I never actually dedicated an entire tech stuff to that product.
Speaker 1: And it's infamous for being one of the biggest products
Speaker 1: that flopped in tech history, at the very least one
Speaker 1: of the biggest flops in the gaming space, and certainly
Speaker 1: one of the biggest for Nintendo. And you know, when
Speaker 1: it came out from Nintendo, it was back in the
Speaker 1: day where Nintendo was an organization that was just knocking
Speaker 1: it out of the park one after the other. Because
Speaker 1: by the time the Virtual Boy came out, you had
Speaker 1: the Nintendo Entertainment System or the Famine, You had the
Speaker 1: Super Nintendo Entertainment System, the SNES or Sness or Super Famicom,
Speaker 1: and then you also had the Game Boy, all of
Speaker 1: which had come out by the time the Virtual Boy
Speaker 1: came out. I mean, Virtual Boy's name is a nod
Speaker 1: to the Game Boy, and all of those systems sold
Speaker 1: like gangbusters. So at that point, Nintendo was almost a
Speaker 1: company that was guaranteed to succeed, so the fact that
Speaker 1: it failed would become huge news. So let's talk about
Speaker 1: the Virtual Boy and its placed in Nintendo history and
Speaker 1: tech in general. Now, first off, some of y'all might
Speaker 1: not even know what the Virtual Boy was. Right, if
Speaker 1: you were born after the mid nineties and you've never
Speaker 1: really been into gaming or anything, you might not have
Speaker 1: ever seen one. So it looked like a pair of
Speaker 1: red binoculars mounted on a little bipod stand like a
Speaker 1: tabletop or desktop stand. Unlike binoculars, there were no lenses
Speaker 1: on the front of the device, or I guess the
Speaker 1: back of the device, depending on if you're looking at
Speaker 1: it from the perspective of someone who's using it, in
Speaker 1: which case it would be the back of the device,
Speaker 1: or someone who's seeing someone else use it, in which
Speaker 1: case it would be what you're looking at the front. Anyway,
Speaker 1: you would stand the Virtual Boy on a table and
Speaker 1: you would have to lean forward to look into the screen,
Speaker 1: so your forehead would go up against it. You'd look
Speaker 1: into it almost like a viewfinder, and you would then
Speaker 1: hold a wired controller that connected directly to the headset
Speaker 1: and you would play games. In many ways, it was
Speaker 1: similar to virtual reality headsets that we would see much
Speaker 1: much later. Right, These kind of looks like something like
Speaker 1: an Oculus, except it's very red. It stands out through
Speaker 1: the color. But it looked like an Oculus headset in
Speaker 1: some ways. But again, it was mounted on a bipod
Speaker 1: that you would set on a table. And you have
Speaker 1: to remember Virtual Boy launched in nineteen ninety five, well
Speaker 1: before we would get something like an Oculus. In fact,
Speaker 1: in the middle in nineties, your typical real virtual reality
Speaker 1: headset would be this super heavy head mounted display. Often
Speaker 1: you would need to suspend it from the ceiling with
Speaker 1: cables in order to offset the weight, because otherwise it
Speaker 1: would be far too heavy for someone to wear, at
Speaker 1: least for any real length of time. So the Virtual
Speaker 1: Boy was a big departure from what people had been
Speaker 1: used to if they, in fact had encountered virtual reality
Speaker 1: systems at all. Not many people had. Some folks like
Speaker 1: me were lucky enough to live near a shopping mall
Speaker 1: that had a virtual reality arcade in it, so I
Speaker 1: had had experience with it, but not everybody did. And
Speaker 1: so I guess if you had never used one of
Speaker 1: these big systems, it wouldn't seem like such a huge
Speaker 1: deal that the form factor of the Virtual Boy was
Speaker 1: so small in comparison. But you wouldn't strap the Virtual
Speaker 1: Boy to your head, you know, you couldn't wear it
Speaker 1: around and look at anything. It's not like you could
Speaker 1: wear it like an auction system. And there wasn't head
Speaker 1: tracking technology built into the Virtual Boy, although the initial
Speaker 1: plan was to have head tracking incorporated into the device.
Speaker 1: We'll talk about that. So this was really just a
Speaker 1: stationary console system that had sort of a viewfinder form
Speaker 1: factor that you would use, and even that was limited
Speaker 1: because it was monochromatic. But that's the quick description of
Speaker 1: the physical product. But let's go down memory lane to
Speaker 1: talk about its development, and first we have to consider
Speaker 1: a couple of big components. Really one is the most important,
Speaker 1: and that is the rise of virtual reality and culture
Speaker 1: in the nineteen nineties, because that's what would drive a
Speaker 1: lot of the excitement, at least at Nintendo initially for
Speaker 1: the development of the Virtual Boy. We also have to
Speaker 1: remember the length of a development cycle for a new
Speaker 1: console system and how much things can change in those
Speaker 1: linky development cycles. Right when a game system comes out,
Speaker 1: we have to keep in mind that's the product of
Speaker 1: years of work. Sometimes a company is working on the
Speaker 1: next generation of a system while it has yet to
Speaker 1: release the most recent generation. Right like, if you're getting
Speaker 1: a PS four, you can bet that Sony was hard
Speaker 1: at work already on the PS five. So let's really
Speaker 1: think about virtual reality first. Now, the history of VR
Speaker 1: stretches back pretty darn far. Where you start largely depends
Speaker 1: upon what you think of as being the most important
Speaker 1: component of virtual reality. And you could argue that you
Speaker 1: go back to like stereoscopic camera systems from the nineteenth century.
Speaker 1: I think that's going too far. We're just going to
Speaker 1: start back in the nineteen fifties when Morton Heilig created
Speaker 1: a pretty gimmicky device called the Sensorama. So the Sensorama
Speaker 1: was housed in a cabinet sort of similar to an
Speaker 1: arcade machine, and you would sit down in a chair
Speaker 1: at a like a little console, and your head would
Speaker 1: essentially be enveloped by this cabinet like you were leaning
Speaker 1: in in the sides of the case, and it would
Speaker 1: block your peripheral vision. The device would attempt to engage
Speaker 1: all of your senses to create a really immersive experience.
Speaker 1: So there was a screen that you would look at,
Speaker 1: there were speakers that were designed to play kind of
Speaker 1: a surround sound experience to you. There were fans that
Speaker 1: could blow air on you. There were canisters containing stuff
Speaker 1: with strong smells, strong sense to kind of create a
Speaker 1: smell of vision sort of experience, and the chair that
Speaker 1: you sat in would vibrate then give you some haptic feedback.
Speaker 1: Hilig made several short films to showcase his invention and
Speaker 1: what it was capable of, and I really wish I
Speaker 1: could experience one of those, just to get a first
Speaker 1: hand feel for what it was like. Apparently there were
Speaker 1: like half a dozen different titles, and I don't care
Speaker 1: which one it was. I would just like to really
Speaker 1: find out what it felt like to watch something in
Speaker 1: one of these and to have all the different effects
Speaker 1: go off. But I don't know of any that are working.
Speaker 1: There might be one or two in different museums or whatever,
Speaker 1: but I've never come across one. Clearly. Though, the Cincerama
Speaker 1: didn't become a best selling product, however, it did illustrate
Speaker 1: that there was something really compelling about immersive technology that
Speaker 1: engaged multiple senses. Kind of like that. So in the
Speaker 1: nineteen sixties you had engineers at the pill Co Corporation
Speaker 1: who developed a head mounded display that had motion tracking
Speaker 1: technology incorporated into it. That was a big, big step
Speaker 1: for VR. Now, this device was meant to give the
Speaker 1: wearer a real time view through a closed circuit camera.
Speaker 1: So this is actually more like an augmented reality or
Speaker 1: remote viewing technology rather than virtual reality. Remember, virtual reality
Speaker 1: is when you have all the images and sounds that
Speaker 1: you encounter generated by a computer. So augmented reality is
Speaker 1: when you're using technology to enhance or augment your experience
Speaker 1: moving through a real space. This is kind of more
Speaker 1: like a virtual presence because again it gave you a
Speaker 1: chance to control a camera just by looking around. The
Speaker 1: intent of this particular technology was to allow humans to
Speaker 1: navigate through an environment that would be risky for humans
Speaker 1: to move through normally. It was a military technology, so
Speaker 1: you could imagine using something like this to diffuse a bomb, perhaps,
Speaker 1: or to scope out a war zone situation or something
Speaker 1: like that. So turning your head would send a command
Speaker 1: to the connected camera, and the camera would then turn
Speaker 1: to reflect the way you were looking, and it would
Speaker 1: give you a new view of whatever situation you were in.
Speaker 1: So it wasn't strictly a VR application, but the head
Speaker 1: tracking technology would become a very important component in future
Speaker 1: VR applications. In the late nineteen sixties, Ivan Sutherland, who
Speaker 1: had already proposed an idea called the Ultimate Display. He
Speaker 1: theorized that you could create a display that would make
Speaker 1: such a compelling immersive experience that for the viewer it
Speaker 1: would be indistinguishable from reality like that was his sort
Speaker 1: of premise that he was proposing. Well, he didn't create
Speaker 1: the ultimate display, that was more like a thought experiment.
Speaker 1: What he did do was he helped build technologies that
Speaker 1: would get us closer incrementally toward his vision. One of
Speaker 1: those was a head mounted display that was sometimes called
Speaker 1: the Sword of Damocles because like the sort of Damoicles,
Speaker 1: it was suspended again from the ceiling. So this display
Speaker 1: connected to a computer system and not a camera, so
Speaker 1: instead of controlling a camera and getting a video view,
Speaker 1: you were truly getting a virtual environment that you could
Speaker 1: look around. But the sort of Damicles was huge. It
Speaker 1: was very bulky, very heavy. Again, it had to be
Speaker 1: mounted to the ceiling to offset the weight, so that
Speaker 1: meant that it was really limited in what you could
Speaker 1: do with it. Right, It's not like it was a
Speaker 1: portable device that you could just set up anywhere, but
Speaker 1: it did have head tracking technology included, so you could
Speaker 1: turn and look around inside a virtual environment, and again
Speaker 1: that would become a key component for V. Now we're
Speaker 1: gonna skip way ahead, but clearly tons of people were
Speaker 1: innovating in the space and they were generating ideas that
Speaker 1: would find their way into later iterations of VR technology.
Speaker 1: Now at this stage, VR was largely a thing happening
Speaker 1: in research laboratories, and it wasn't something that was reflected
Speaker 1: in consumer products. In fact, the mainstream public remained blissfully
Speaker 1: unaware of virtual reality unless they also happened to be
Speaker 1: science fiction fans, in which case they may have read
Speaker 1: about these concepts relating to VR in various stories and novels,
Speaker 1: but chances are they had never had any first hand
Speaker 1: experience because again, it was mostly in R and D
Speaker 1: departments in various tech companies. Now, one element that would
Speaker 1: become critical for the Virtual Boy itself was its LED display,
Speaker 1: which was somewhat infamous. It was a display that would
Speaker 1: only show red images on a black background. When we
Speaker 1: come back, I will talk about where that idea got
Speaker 1: its start, and it wasn't at Nintendo. But before we
Speaker 1: get into all that, let's take a quick break to
Speaker 1: thank our sponsors. We're back, and before the break, I
Speaker 1: was talking about the Virtual Boys LED display, which would
Speaker 1: show you red images on a black background. Well, that
Speaker 1: all began with an engineer named Alan Becker, who was
Speaker 1: trying to invent a display that would boast a high
Speaker 1: resolution and a suitable amount of brightness. So that you
Speaker 1: could do some computing in an environment, such as if
Speaker 1: you were sitting in an airplane seat, right Like, The
Speaker 1: problem was that a lot of portable computers and I
Speaker 1: used the term lightly because in this time, in the
Speaker 1: nineteen eighties, portable computers were very rare, and they were
Speaker 1: very heavy and bulky and didn't have a very good
Speaker 1: battery life. But if you did happen to have one,
Speaker 1: chances are it was using a liquid crystal display, and
Speaker 1: those weren't necessarily you know, they weren't backlit, so if
Speaker 1: you were in a dimly lit environment, it'd be really
Speaker 1: hard to read anything that was on the screen. So
Speaker 1: what Becker wanted to do was to create a display
Speaker 1: that would be bright, high resolution, and inexpensive to manufacture.
Speaker 1: All of these things were really important if you wanted
Speaker 1: to make a good display that could be a practical product. Obviously,
Speaker 1: if it was really expensive, then you would price yourself
Speaker 1: out of the market. So Becker thought you could use
Speaker 1: LEDs to draw images many times a second and then
Speaker 1: count on the persistence of vision to kind of do
Speaker 1: the rest of the work. And he invented a device
Speaker 1: that used an oscillating mirror to reflect LED images towards
Speaker 1: the viewer, and it worked. He named his invention the
Speaker 1: scanned linear array. A line of these LEDs would do
Speaker 1: all the light. The mirror reflection would essentially draw the
Speaker 1: images in front of your eyes, and it worked, and
Speaker 1: the components he used weren't terribly expensive, So his hope
Speaker 1: was that he could make this something that could be
Speaker 1: put into mass production. But he would need to have
Speaker 1: a partner to be able to do that, because while
Speaker 1: he had invented this technology, he needed to have a
Speaker 1: fully fledged product for it to be something that could
Speaker 1: be sold on the market. So this was just a
Speaker 1: step toward a goal. One of the components that he used,
Speaker 1: one that would become completely linked with Virtual Boy years later,
Speaker 1: were red LEDs. So these were LEDs light emitting diodes
Speaker 1: that only would emit red light. It's not some multicolored
Speaker 1: diode here. And the reason why he used red LEDs,
Speaker 1: why he was restricted to just using red was the
Speaker 1: result of a partnership he formed with a manufacturing company
Speaker 1: that made printers, and the printers that the company made
Speaker 1: used red LEDs, so that's what Becker had access to.
Speaker 1: He could use the same sort of LEDs that were
Speaker 1: found inside this company's printers, and thus his displays could
Speaker 1: only show red light on a black background. And anyone
Speaker 1: who's used a Virtual Boy will be familiar with that
Speaker 1: description because it's very much the same thing you would
Speaker 1: get with a virtual Boy. It had a monochromatic screen
Speaker 1: that could only display red on black. So Becker would
Speaker 1: later start a company called Reflection Technology, thus referencing the
Speaker 1: oscillating mirror in his device, and he would hire on
Speaker 1: other engineers to work with him. And one other thing
Speaker 1: that they created was a much smaller display that, when
Speaker 1: you held it close to your eyes, could replicate a
Speaker 1: much larger display, which is a fancy way of saying
Speaker 1: stuff looks bigger the closer you are to it. So
Speaker 1: if you hold a small display up very close to
Speaker 1: your eyes, you know it still ends up filling up
Speaker 1: most of your visual field. So this too, would be
Speaker 1: an important development for the Virtual Boy. Later on, they
Speaker 1: called this new product Private Eye, and I think that's
Speaker 1: pretty cute. The Private Eye and Becker's innovations would become
Speaker 1: well known in certain tech circles, as the company would
Speaker 1: demonstrate its technology at conferences and such, and it would
Speaker 1: play into the development of stuff like wearable computers, like
Speaker 1: this whole idea of computational systems that don't take the
Speaker 1: traditional form factor of a desktop or laptop. Okay, we're
Speaker 1: going to leave off with reflecting technology for the moment.
Speaker 1: We will come back to them. Let's get back to
Speaker 1: the evolution of VR at the time. So we didn't
Speaker 1: even get the term virtual reality until nineteen eighty seven,
Speaker 1: So this is after reflecting technology has already started to
Speaker 1: innovate in that space. And nineteen eighty seven was when
Speaker 1: a guy named Jarn Lanier, famous in VR circles, proposed
Speaker 1: the phrase, or at the very least elevated its use,
Speaker 1: because there's some who say he didn't coin the term,
Speaker 1: but he popularized the term. Either way, Lanier has a
Speaker 1: lot of the responsibility for VR kind of taking off
Speaker 1: as a concept in the late eighties into the early
Speaker 1: and mid nineties. Okay, now we're going to switch over
Speaker 1: and talk about the Nintendo Entertainment System and the Nintendo
Speaker 1: company for a second, because the NES would actually introduce
Speaker 1: a peripheral that had some VR elements to it, even
Speaker 1: though it ultimately is not a device that was made
Speaker 1: by Nintendo itself. But you know, I've done full episodes
Speaker 1: about Nintendo. We're not going to go over the entire
Speaker 1: history of the company, besides which Nintendo is more than
Speaker 1: a century old. It actually has its origins connected to
Speaker 1: playing cards back in Japan. But the important part for
Speaker 1: our purposes is that Nintendo swept into the home video
Speaker 1: game market at a time when in America at least
Speaker 1: it was in a shambles. That is, the market was
Speaker 1: in a shambles. The early nineteen eighties saw an explosion
Speaker 1: in video game consoles and titles, some of which were
Speaker 1: clearly rush jobs. They were just terrible games or very
Speaker 1: poorly made. The glood of systems and games got dumped
Speaker 1: on a market that just couldn't sustain all that stuff,
Speaker 1: and eventually everything just collapsed sometime around nineteen eighty three,
Speaker 1: and when the dust cleared, companies like Atari, which had
Speaker 1: been a dominant force in home video games, were all
Speaker 1: but obsolete. In the wake of that crash, retailers were
Speaker 1: really wary of carrying another home system, so the general
Speaker 1: wisdom was that consoles were kind of over as a thing,
Speaker 1: at least in North America, and the way the future
Speaker 1: was actually the personal computer. Then we get Nintendo now
Speaker 1: the company had launched its first full video game console system,
Speaker 1: called the Famicom or family computer, back in Japan in
Speaker 1: nineteen eighty three, the same year where video games crashed
Speaker 1: in North America. Nintendo executives had aspirations of entering the
Speaker 1: American market, but they really faced an uphill battle because
Speaker 1: of the disaster that was that video game crash. However,
Speaker 1: in nineteen eighty five, the Nintendo Entertainment System would debut
Speaker 1: in a few test markets to great success and with
Speaker 1: some very clever marketing by Nintendo, which implied the NAEs
Speaker 1: was really, in fact a computer system and not a
Speaker 1: video game console. The very much video game console would
Speaker 1: find itself carried in American stores from late nineteen eighty
Speaker 1: five through the rest of that decade, Nintendo was a powerhouse.
Speaker 1: It was seen as being unbeatable. It helped resurrect the
Speaker 1: home video game market in North America. The company put
Speaker 1: out tons of great games that delighted folks all around
Speaker 1: the world. And so now we're going to skip up
Speaker 1: to nineteen eighty nine. So this is just two years
Speaker 1: after Jaron Lanier had started to popularize the phrase virtual reality,
Speaker 1: and that's when Nintendo introduced a controller peripheral for the
Speaker 1: NES called the Power Glove. Now, as the name implies,
Speaker 1: it was a controller that was in a glove or
Speaker 1: gauntlet form factor and on the back of the forearm
Speaker 1: of this clove was a variant of the standard NES
Speaker 1: controller had some extra buttons and stuff on it that
Speaker 1: really complicated the interface. But the idea was that this
Speaker 1: glove could take on specific hand motions and reinterpret those
Speaker 1: as various commands that you could program the glove to
Speaker 1: let you control a video game with your hand without
Speaker 1: having to hold a controller and you know, push the
Speaker 1: direction pad and the buttons and stuff. It was a
Speaker 1: cool concept. I mean, it had a high learning curve
Speaker 1: because just figuring out how to program the thing was
Speaker 1: a bit of a challenge. It also had a really
Speaker 1: cool look depending upon your esthetic, but you know, kind
Speaker 1: of a chunky, science fiction look to it. You can
Speaker 1: easily see pictures of it. If you're not familiar with
Speaker 1: the Power Glove, you can just do a quick search
Speaker 1: and see lots of pictures of the Power Glove. Now,
Speaker 1: the Nintendo itself wasn't responsible for the development of the
Speaker 1: Power Glove. There was another company called the Abrams Gentile
Speaker 1: entertainment or age that developed this device, this peripheral. They
Speaker 1: modeled it after other wearable control systems that were more
Speaker 1: expensive and complicated and had more features that were being
Speaker 1: used in research and development labs, but were not meant
Speaker 1: to be consumer products. So they partnered here in North
Speaker 1: America with Mattel to manufacture the peripheral in the United States.
Speaker 1: There were other companies that would be manufacturers in other
Speaker 1: parts of the world. Obviously, the developers really had to
Speaker 1: reduce the complexity and utility of the form factor in
Speaker 1: order to get the device to a level that could
Speaker 1: be mass produced for a reasonable price. So while it
Speaker 1: was based off similar technologies that were kind of transforming
Speaker 1: virtual reality research and development in various labs, it was
Speaker 1: a much more modest peripheral. Now, the power Glove sold
Speaker 1: pretty well. It wasn't a blockbuster like the Nintendo Entertainment System,
Speaker 1: but it did okay, and I would argue it was
Speaker 1: one element that would elevate the concept of VR among
Speaker 1: the general public, even though the power Glove really meant
Speaker 1: as a replacement for a standard controller and nothing more
Speaker 1: than that. While the sales figures were good for the gadget,
Speaker 1: the reviews were decidedly mixed to negative, which is being kind.
Speaker 1: Though interestingly, folks in the VR space would end up
Speaker 1: using the power Glove devices later in the nineteen nineties
Speaker 1: after the ground would fall out for funding VR projects,
Speaker 1: which I might come back to to mention a little
Speaker 1: bit in the end of this episode. So Nintendo sort
Speaker 1: of dips the corporate tow in VR waters in the
Speaker 1: late nineteen eighties, though again the company itself didn't develop
Speaker 1: the Power Glove, and the Power Glove is just a peripheral,
Speaker 1: not of true VR device. But virtual reality was starting
Speaker 1: to take hold in the public imagination. Right before, the
Speaker 1: public was largely ignorant of VR in general, but now
Speaker 1: they're starting to understand at least a version of what
Speaker 1: VR could be, and that was starting to build in
Speaker 1: excitement and height. By the early nineteen nineties, that was
Speaker 1: really ramping up, largely because of both advancements in technology
Speaker 1: as well as depictions and media. You started getting science
Speaker 1: fiction films that were playing with the concept of virtual reality,
Speaker 1: and folks were thinking, Wow, this will be the next
Speaker 1: era of computing. Meanwhile, Reflection Technology, the company that made
Speaker 1: the Private Eye display, they had continued to innovate around
Speaker 1: their Private Eye design, and they built a cheap demonstration
Speaker 1: model of a head mounted display. They were able to
Speaker 1: outfit it with head tracking technology and they used a
Speaker 1: pair of Private Eye displays, one for each eye, and
Speaker 1: they put all of this on top of like a
Speaker 1: welder's mask, so you can put this mask on. It
Speaker 1: would have the head tracking technology and the displays built
Speaker 1: into it, and then you could play a little video
Speaker 1: game demo they made in which you would fight against tanks.
Speaker 1: So if you turned your head in real life, your
Speaker 1: perspective would change within the game, so by looking around
Speaker 1: you could identify tank targets and fire at them using
Speaker 1: a controller and destroy tanks this way. And it was
Speaker 1: a simple demo, but a really compelling and effective one.
Speaker 1: The demonstration was a hit for folks who've got to
Speaker 1: try it, although the system also had some latency, which
Speaker 1: meant it could be pretty easy for at least some
Speaker 1: people to feel a bit of motion sickness after using it.
Speaker 1: Latency in this case is the delay between taking an
Speaker 1: action such as turning your head and then seeing the
Speaker 1: result play out, which would be like your perspective changing
Speaker 1: as you turn your head. So we humans are pretty
Speaker 1: sensitive to latency. A noticeable lag between when you turn
Speaker 1: your head and when your perspective changes is really off putting,
Speaker 1: and personally, I find as I get older, I am
Speaker 1: far more susceptible to motion sickness from this kind of thing.
Speaker 1: So I'm pretty sure that after just a few minutes
Speaker 1: of playing this, I probably would have felt rumbly in
Speaker 1: the tumbly, so to speak. Anyway, Reflection Technology started to
Speaker 1: try and find an application or a partner to work
Speaker 1: with to bring this invention to market and to just
Speaker 1: pull it out of R and D and put it
Speaker 1: into some sort of product, and they approached a lot
Speaker 1: of different companies in the gaming and toys space, so
Speaker 1: like Sega was one of them, and Sega said no.
Speaker 1: They weren't terribly crazy about the monochromatic display, which could
Speaker 1: still only show just red on a black background, and
Speaker 1: they weren't really keen on the idea that kids might
Speaker 1: get dizzy and puke after playing the device for just
Speaker 1: a couple of minutes. That seemed like a tough sell.
Speaker 1: So Sega passed on it, and a lot of other
Speaker 1: companies said yeah no, thanks to this private eye headset.
Speaker 1: But Reflection Technology had better luck in meeting with you
Speaker 1: guessed it, Nintendo. So at this point Nintendo was writing
Speaker 1: super high. The Neees was a mega blockbuster hit, the
Speaker 1: Game Boy was an incredibly popular handheld system. The Super
Speaker 1: Nintendo didn't do quite as well as the ns did,
Speaker 1: but sold tens of millions of units. So the company
Speaker 1: is the high bar in the gaming space. And fortunately,
Speaker 1: when Reflection Technology would send a representative to Japan to
Speaker 1: meet with Nintendo executives, they would find a company that
Speaker 1: was interested in taking some risks and making a big
Speaker 1: change in just the way that people play games, and
Speaker 1: that was never a guarantee. But there was one person
Speaker 1: in particular at Nintendo who would become sort of the
Speaker 1: champion and cheerleader of the Virtual Boy project named Gunpay Yakoi,
Speaker 1: and he found Reflection technologies demonstration of their private eye
Speaker 1: headset to be really exciting, and he also really liked
Speaker 1: that they had found ways of using inexpensive components to
Speaker 1: get an incredible result, which is of course a key
Speaker 1: decision if you want to mass market something to the
Speaker 1: general public. So he would become a large reason why
Speaker 1: Nintendo would take a big chance with this private eye
Speaker 1: technology to develop what would become the Virtual Boy. I'll
Speaker 1: tell more about the Virtual Boy's story in just a moment,
Speaker 1: but before we do that, let's take another quick break
Speaker 1: to thank our sponsors. Okay, before the break, I mentioned
Speaker 1: gun pay Yukoi was really excited by this, and he
Speaker 1: was particularly enthusiastic about this idea of playing games in
Speaker 1: a new and different way from other consoles. So his
Speaker 1: focus had always been on finding new means to allow
Speaker 1: people to play, not just video games, but just play
Speaker 1: in general, Like why should we be limited to a
Speaker 1: specific form factor like a screen and a controller? Why
Speaker 1: should that be the only way we play? He was
Speaker 1: also not a fan of how the industry was trending
Speaker 1: toward a race to push faster, more powerful machines is
Speaker 1: sort of the sole path towards success, which I think
Speaker 1: anyone who's been into gaming in the last decade or
Speaker 1: so kind of can really identify that. That is a
Speaker 1: trend that continued at least between Sony and Microsoft, right, Like,
Speaker 1: every time new consoles come out between the two of
Speaker 1: those companies, you pretty much just break it down by
Speaker 1: comparing stats and specs, and there's not much other innovation there, Like, yes,
Speaker 1: the new machine can process things faster with a better
Speaker 1: frame rate and higher fidelity graphics, but otherwise everything's the same.
Speaker 1: You're still playing with a controller. Maybe you get a
Speaker 1: little innovation now and then, and sometimes it works out,
Speaker 1: sometimes it doesn't. So like Sony Move definitely had a
Speaker 1: higher success rate than the Microsoft Connect for that for example,
Speaker 1: you call over at Nintendo. He wasn't interested in just
Speaker 1: pushing for better graphics and better sound and just have
Speaker 1: that be the defining factor for game systems. He wanted
Speaker 1: to find new means of letting people play games. And
Speaker 1: you can see some of Yakoi's philosophy and other Nintendo
Speaker 1: products that came out even after his passing, such as
Speaker 1: the Wei console, I would argue, kind of embraces this philosophy.
Speaker 1: The Wei didn't have the same processing power as the
Speaker 1: competing consoles on the market at the time, but it
Speaker 1: did introduce innovations in gameplay that made the console a
Speaker 1: huge hit for the company. People who never bought a
Speaker 1: game system got interested in the Wi because of its
Speaker 1: approach to gameplay. Anyway, Yacoi saw the private Eye system
Speaker 1: of reflecting technology as a means to innovate beyond just
Speaker 1: making consoles more powerful. Yakoi thought the darkness of a
Speaker 1: Private Eye headset without the LEDs on were a pure black,
Speaker 1: and it meant that you would have a perfect canvas
Speaker 1: for your games. That players would be unable to see
Speaker 1: the edges of the display itself because it would all
Speaker 1: just be black, and so they'd be completely immersed in
Speaker 1: whatever world the game developers wanted to create. Well, it
Speaker 1: was a really compelling vision from a game developer perspective,
Speaker 1: no pun intended, or maybe no pun nintended. The Reflection
Speaker 1: Technology team got what they wanted, and then some Nintendo
Speaker 1: agreed to a worldwide exclusive license to the Private Eye
Speaker 1: headset technology. Reflection Technology got a hefty licensing fee plus
Speaker 1: guaranteed royalties, not a bad deal. The development at that
Speaker 1: point started to shift toward Nintendo, and the company encountered
Speaker 1: a few challenges along the way. So originally Yakoi was
Speaker 1: hoping to create a wearable headset with the Private Eye
Speaker 1: display as sort of the Crown Jewel, but it turned
Speaker 1: out that to build a system capable of playing different games,
Speaker 1: the company would need to build in a CPU that
Speaker 1: had a tendency to emit a lot of electromagnetic radiation
Speaker 1: and the two problems that this would raise is that one,
Speaker 1: there wasn't enough research on the subject to determine if
Speaker 1: having an EMF emitter that close to your noggin was
Speaker 1: medically safe, so the company would be taking on risk.
Speaker 1: Right if it were discovered later that, oh, having something
Speaker 1: blasting EMFs that close to your brain is going to
Speaker 1: give you a brain rod or whatever, then Nintendo could
Speaker 1: be potentially liable. So that was one problem. The other
Speaker 1: was that if you were playing close to other EMF emitters,
Speaker 1: you could end up getting a lot of interference and
Speaker 1: that would impact your gameplay experience. To solve for these problems,
Speaker 1: Nintendo chose to cap the processor with a metal plate
Speaker 1: and that would block these emissions so that you didn't
Speaker 1: have to worry about it. However, the metal plate added
Speaker 1: a significant amount to the weight of the device, which
Speaker 1: meant it was no longer practical as a wearable headset
Speaker 1: because no one would want to wear it for long
Speaker 1: enough to play a full game. It would just be
Speaker 1: too heavy. So first, Yukoi explored an alternative solution, which
Speaker 1: would be to have the display mounted on kind of
Speaker 1: a structure that would fit over the player's shoulders. So
Speaker 1: this way the player could still wear the device. It'd
Speaker 1: be kind of like being a batman in the Tim
Speaker 1: Burton Batman film, where you couldn't turn your head. You
Speaker 1: had to move your whole upper body to turn. But
Speaker 1: this approach would be mean the weight would be distributed
Speaker 1: on the shoulders rather than on the head, and that
Speaker 1: meant that you could still have some tracking technology in there. However,
Speaker 1: lawyers at Nintendo were worried about scenarios in which a
Speaker 1: player could be injured while wearing the gadget, like if
Speaker 1: they're just walking around their house and then toppled down
Speaker 1: a flight of stairs or something. So because of the
Speaker 1: perceived liability they would encounter if they used this design,
Speaker 1: they mixed that approach, so then ya Koi had the
Speaker 1: face facts. The only way he was really going to
Speaker 1: get this new system approved and out the door was
Speaker 1: to turn it into a stationary console. So if it's stationary,
Speaker 1: if you're just going to put it on a bipod,
Speaker 1: as they ultimately chose to do, that means you no
Speaker 1: longer need to have any head tracking technology in it
Speaker 1: at all, because it's not moving, it's staying still. The
Speaker 1: new concept would be a headset just mounted on a
Speaker 1: bipod that you would PLoP on a table or desk
Speaker 1: and you would just lean forward and look into a
Speaker 1: display instead. Now, on the bright side, that motion sickness
Speaker 1: issue wouldn't be as big a deal this way, because
Speaker 1: even if you had latency, well, it's not like you're
Speaker 1: moving your head around expecting to see your point of
Speaker 1: view change instantaneously. Now, according to a wonderful piece by
Speaker 1: Benja Edwards in Fast Company titled Unraveling the Enigma of
Speaker 1: Nintendo's Virtual Boy twenty years later, I highly recommend you
Speaker 1: read it if you're interested in the Virtual Boy. It
Speaker 1: goes into much greater detail. Well, Yakoya himself began to
Speaker 1: feel misgivings about this project. He had to compromise several
Speaker 1: times in order to get his product designed to a
Speaker 1: point where the company would actually give it a go
Speaker 1: ahead to go into production. And part of making all
Speaker 1: these compromises meant that, despite the fact that the Virtual
Speaker 1: Boy was now going to be a tabletop device, he
Speaker 1: also was not allowed to upgrade the processors so that
Speaker 1: it could display great graphics. I mean, now he's like, well,
Speaker 1: if we're not worried about weight, because it's not going
Speaker 1: to be worn in any way. Maybe we could put
Speaker 1: in a different processor and have higher fidelity graphics in
Speaker 1: this thing, but Nintendo said, no, We've already invested in
Speaker 1: the reflection technology approach, so it doesn't make sense for
Speaker 1: us to switch that. So you're going to be stuck
Speaker 1: with those specs. It meant that he would have to
Speaker 1: use things like wireframe graphics or simple sprites, and you
Speaker 1: could argue this was a sunken cost fallacy issue that
Speaker 1: Nintendo was like, well, we can't switch now because we've
Speaker 1: already spent too much money. But you know, there are
Speaker 1: some practical limits here. I mean, you could also argue
Speaker 1: that Nintendo was a company that this stage was essentially
Speaker 1: printing money and they could have invested more heavily into
Speaker 1: Virtual Boy, but that just didn't unfold. So it meant
Speaker 1: that Yakoi was stuck with some design elements that were
Speaker 1: really limiting, and even though he could have tried to
Speaker 1: push for a device that had more compelling selling points,
Speaker 1: the company just wasn't interested. So, as Ben Edwards explains
Speaker 1: in that brilliant Piece and Fast Company, Nintendo had also
Speaker 1: commissioned studies to look into how the LED display might
Speaker 1: adversely affect vision. Again, Nintendo wanted to make sure this
Speaker 1: gadget wasn't going to cause legal problems for the company
Speaker 1: Further down the line, it wouldn't do for Nintendo to
Speaker 1: release the Virtual Boy only to discover that after a
Speaker 1: prolonged session of play, kids were complaining that their eyeballs
Speaker 1: didn't work so good. So they commissioned this study, and
Speaker 1: apparently the study found that as long as the vertical
Speaker 1: alignment of the two screens was correct, then there really
Speaker 1: were no issues with vision. If one screen, however, was
Speaker 1: at a different vertical alignment than the other screen, kids
Speaker 1: could develop a lazy eye, particularly if the kid was
Speaker 1: younger than seven years old. So Nintendo made some design
Speaker 1: adjustments to ensure that the two screens were properly aligned,
Speaker 1: and just for good measure, they slapt a warning on
Speaker 1: the device saying that kids under the age of seven
Speaker 1: shouldn't play with it. There were other warnings that the
Speaker 1: company released as well. The system itself would remind players regularly,
Speaker 1: like you know, like every fifteen minutes that they should
Speaker 1: take a break to rest their eyes. And because there
Speaker 1: was this incredibly harsh law in Japan that essentially said
Speaker 1: a company would be liable if someone used one of
Speaker 1: their products and then got injured unless the company explicitly
Speaker 1: warned users against that specific use case. So, in other words,
Speaker 1: like you would have to anticipate all the ways that
Speaker 1: customers might use your product that could be done in
Speaker 1: a dangerous way, and you would really need to lay
Speaker 1: it out clearly that you're not supposed to use it
Speaker 1: this way, because if they did use it that way
Speaker 1: and they got hurt, they could sue the company and
Speaker 1: there'd be legal standing for it. You couldn't just argue, well,
Speaker 1: this was an unreasonable use of the technology. No one
Speaker 1: is supposed to do that, because they would say if
Speaker 1: no one's supposed to do it, why didn't you say so. So,
Speaker 1: in other words, Nintendo would go overboard explaining out how
Speaker 1: you were not supposed to use the Virtual Boy in
Speaker 1: order to limit the liability, And the result was that
Speaker 1: the manual made it sound like the Virtual Boy was
Speaker 1: about as safe as going skydiving without taking a lesson first.
Speaker 1: So it created a reputation for the Virtual Boy as
Speaker 1: being potentially dangerous, But really it was just a manifestation
Speaker 1: of a company trying to head off potential lawsuits. In
Speaker 1: the future. Now, the first time folks outside of Nintendo
Speaker 1: itself could give the Virtual Boy a whirl, which up
Speaker 1: to that point the project was actually named VR thirty two.
Speaker 1: It hadn't received the Virtual Boy brand yet. Well. The
Speaker 1: first time was at a software industry conference in Japan,
Speaker 1: and this was in late nineteen ninety four. At that time,
Speaker 1: Nintendo's hope was to sell the Virtual Boy in North
Speaker 1: America for around two hundred dollars, and they had high
Speaker 1: hopes that they would see really healthy sales by the
Speaker 1: end of the first year on the market, and boy,
Speaker 1: howdi that would not be the way it would play out. Meanwhile,
Speaker 1: the reaction among the attendees of this conference was one
Speaker 1: of the fuddled apathy. The monochromatic display was a big
Speaker 1: turn off. I mean, people were starting to get used
Speaker 1: to pretty decent graphics at this point. It was also
Speaker 1: kind of lame that you had to PLoP this device
Speaker 1: on a table and then lean forward to view anything.
Speaker 1: Pretty quickly, folks noticed that unless you had the height
Speaker 1: just right between you and the Virtual Boy, you were
Speaker 1: likely going to have to binge your neck in such
Speaker 1: a way that pretty soon things would be uncomfortable. So
Speaker 1: It wasn't exactly a stellar debut, but Nintendo continued on.
Speaker 1: They showed the Virtual Boy off at the following Consumer
Speaker 1: Electronics show in Las Vegas, Nevada, and again they got
Speaker 1: a pretty lackluster response among the press in the public,
Speaker 1: which wasn't a great sign. But what was worse was
Speaker 1: that back in Japan, the press was latched onto those
Speaker 1: warnings that Nintendo had included both on the systems and
Speaker 1: in the manual. So again, Nintendo was doing this in
Speaker 1: an effort to avoid legal problems due to a really
Speaker 1: harsh law in Japan. But the question the prescot was
Speaker 1: that the Virtual Boy was dangerous, that it was potentially
Speaker 1: bad for your eyesight, which in fact, none of the
Speaker 1: studies Nintendo had commissioned seemed to back up. It was
Speaker 1: again just that they were trying to avoid issues because
Speaker 1: of this pretty restrictive law, and instead the Virtual Boy
Speaker 1: got a reputation for being bad for your eyes and
Speaker 1: that reputation was another strike against the system. It really
Speaker 1: did a number on sales in Japan, or at least
Speaker 1: was a big contributing factor to that. I don't think
Speaker 1: you could point to any single reason as why it
Speaker 1: would sell terribly in Japan, but there were lots of
Speaker 1: different factors that kind of converged at the same time.
Speaker 1: Nintendo launched the Virtual Boy in Japan on July twenty first,
Speaker 1: nineteen ninety five. The launch in North America was on
Speaker 1: August twenty first of nineteen ninety five, and like I said,
Speaker 1: sales in Japan were super slow. They didn't even hit
Speaker 1: two hundred thousand units sold. According to most sources I found.
Speaker 1: They did better in North America, but it was like
Speaker 1: a blockbuster hit. It just sold better than it did
Speaker 1: in Japan. The final retail price, at least initially when
Speaker 1: it launched in America, was lower than the two hundred
Speaker 1: dollars that was expected. It was at one seventy nine
Speaker 1: to ninety five. And if we ad just for inflation,
Speaker 1: that means the Virtual Boy system costs around three hundred
Speaker 1: and sixty five dollars in today's money, So three hundred
Speaker 1: and sixty five bucks. That's one dollar for every day
Speaker 1: of the year that you're not playing the system. Assuming
Speaker 1: it's a leap year, you play it that first day
Speaker 1: and never touch it again. Sales were better, like I said,
Speaker 1: in North America, but they did not meet Nintendo's hopes.
Speaker 1: They weren't anywhere close to what the company had been projecting.
Speaker 1: They were thinking sales would be in the millions of units.
Speaker 1: It didn't hit a million in the US, so in
Speaker 1: October nineteen ninety five they lowered the price down to
Speaker 1: one fifty nine ninety five. But in Japan they made
Speaker 1: a much more drastic decision. Within six months of launch,
Speaker 1: they decided, yeah, this is not working. It is a
Speaker 1: total flop, and they pulled the plug and oof, the
Speaker 1: Virtual Boy was gone in Japan, six months after I
Speaker 1: had launched a huge black eye for Nintendo. Virtual Boy
Speaker 1: would have a better lifetime in North America, or at
Speaker 1: least a longer one. It lasted about a full year
Speaker 1: before Nintendo killed it off here at North America. By then,
Speaker 1: the system was selling for just ninety nine dollars, so
Speaker 1: it was a clear whiff from Nintendo, and it seemed
Speaker 1: the folks at the company were awfully embarrassed by the
Speaker 1: whole thing, and Yakoi himself would he would have one
Speaker 1: more hit at Nintendo before he would retire. He was
Speaker 1: already considering retirement from Nintendo to pursue other opportunities before
Speaker 1: the Virtual Boy thing even became a Nintendo project, but
Speaker 1: he did leave after one more success. The press would
Speaker 1: consistently link his retirement with the failure of Virtual Boy. However,
Speaker 1: and tragically, he would die in a car accident just
Speaker 1: a couple of years after retiring, So his story is
Speaker 1: a very sad one. Tons of reasons that The Virtual
Speaker 1: Boy failed. For one thing, it wasn't actually a VR
Speaker 1: product by the time it came out, you know, it
Speaker 1: lacked most of the components that folks tend to associate
Speaker 1: with VR. It didn't have It wasn't wearable, it lacked
Speaker 1: head tracking, and so it really wasn't virtual. And yet
Speaker 1: it was called the Virtual Boy, again a nod to
Speaker 1: the Game Boy handset system, which was incredibly popular, so
Speaker 1: people thought that was hubris. The Virtual Boy had a
Speaker 1: limited library of games. That was partly because Nintendo had
Speaker 1: this corporate culture at the time in which different departments
Speaker 1: were kind of competing against one another. The idea was
Speaker 1: that by competing against each other, the best ideas would
Speaker 1: rise to the top. It would compel them to really
Speaker 1: push the company forward. But it also meant that some
Speaker 1: of the top tier titles and characters were not really
Speaker 1: available for Virtual Boy titles, and that really set the
Speaker 1: game system back quite a bit. The form factor was
Speaker 1: another big strike against the Virtual Boy. That bipod stand
Speaker 1: made it awkward to play the system, and he really
Speaker 1: could get a sore neck from the thing. The press,
Speaker 1: particularly in Japan, played a huge part in discouraging the
Speaker 1: public from adopting the system and played up the supposed
Speaker 1: risks of the device, despite you know, not having evidence
Speaker 1: to back up the supposed harmful effects. The limitations of
Speaker 1: the display also hurt the Virtual Boy's chances in the market.
Speaker 1: Nintendo's refusal to upgrade components to support better graphics meant
Speaker 1: it was stuck with that monochromatic screen, which, while innovative
Speaker 1: and cost effective and boasting a really sharp resolution, still
Speaker 1: had real performance limitations. And then, not too long after
Speaker 1: the Virtual Boy kind of flopped, there was a bigger
Speaker 1: flop in VR in general. Right Like, people got disillusioned
Speaker 1: by virtual reality because the experience they had was not
Speaker 1: what they expected given all the hype and the media
Speaker 1: representations and such, and so the interest and support for
Speaker 1: VR dropped dramatically before the end of the nineties, leaving
Speaker 1: VR research and development projects without much funding or support,
Speaker 1: and things would take a lot longer to progress because
Speaker 1: people just didn't have the assets they needed. They were
Speaker 1: still working in the field, and they were taking advantage
Speaker 1: of things like the power Glove, for example, to kind
Speaker 1: of take up the slack that was left since they
Speaker 1: didn't have the funding to build all new hardware. But yeah,
Speaker 1: Virtual Boy was just one drop in the bucket of
Speaker 1: the failure of VR in the nineties. But my virtual
Speaker 1: hat is off to ign for a really fun April
Speaker 1: Fool's gag with the Virtual Boy pro and again, if
Speaker 1: you want to learn more about the system and the
Speaker 1: stories behind it, including more details about the tragic ending
Speaker 1: for Yakoi, then make sure to read BENJ. Edwards article
Speaker 1: unraveling the Enigma of Nintendo's Virtual Boy twenty years later
Speaker 1: over on Fast Company. It's really well worth a read.
Speaker 1: I drew from lots of different sources for this episode,
Speaker 1: but that piece in particular had a wealth of information
Speaker 1: about the failed Nintendo system. That's all. I hope you
Speaker 1: had a good April Fool's Day. I hope for those
Speaker 1: of you who were able to view the eclipse that
Speaker 1: happened today, I hope it was a great experience. Actually,
Speaker 1: took a little break from recording this episode to do it,
Speaker 1: and it was neat and I hope you're all well
Speaker 1: and I'll talk to you again really soon. Tech Stuff
Speaker 1: is an iHeartRadio production. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit
Speaker 1: the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to
Speaker 1: your favorite shows.