Why is everyone suddenly getting so excited about the Virtual Boy? (Other than that the games are now showing up on the Switch)
I picked one up cheap with some birthday money. It was fun for awhile, but I never developed the emotional attachment to it that I got to other tech like my NES, SNES, or Game Boy.
The Virtual Boy flopped for a very good reason: Not only were the games ugly because they were not in color, but it was very uncomfortable to play, and there was no "spectator" aspect to the games. The games also weren't very original, nor memorable.
(I do remember trying to strap mine to my head with my belt. That lasted about 3 minutes before I gave up and got bored of the games.) Honestly, I would have enjoyed the games more on a TV with red-green glasses, like shown in the article. (When I was a kid I loved everything and anything 3d.)
Did anyone fall in love with theirs? Is anyone really nostalgic for these games? Or is this something like CED, where the lore, because it's rare, makes it interesting even though it flopped for a very good reason?
It's funny to me how a hacked Nintendo 3DS ended up being the best way to play Virtual Boy titles, many decades later, thanks to the Red Viper emulator.
IIRC aliaspider modified the Beetle VB core to do the same thing on the 3DS years before any standalone emulator... it worked but the framerate wasn't fullspeed and afaik they weren't interested in trying to optimize the core further.
It's a bit of a shame that stereoscopic 3D consoles, like the Virtual Boy (or this "Video Boy" here), are no longer a thing outside of VR. And even VR is looking bleak with Meta recently closing their game studios due to huge losses.
I guess people don't want to wear things on their faces. And autostereoscopic screens, which don't require glasses, don't work so well for stationary TVs. The Nintendo 3DS was the only successful system with (auto)stereoscopic 3D so far. Unfortunately its first hardware iteration wasn't quite there yet, and the generally low resolution was an issue.
But I think it could easily have been an optional feature of the Nintendo Switch 2, if they had built in a movable lenticular lens array and a head tracking camera, just like in the "New Nintendo 3DS" (the original 3DS used a simpler but worse system).
To get to the original 1080p resolution, they would also have needed a screen with double the horizontal resolution (3840x1080 rather than 1920x1080), since autostereoscopic screens effectively halve the usable resolution. Games that don't support 3D would just show the same image for both eyes.
It could have been an optional feature even for games that support it, with a choice between a 30FPS 3D mode and a 60 FPS 2D mode, which comes down to the same amount of rendered pixels. An ML system similar to Nvidia's DLSS might even generate the 3D effect (left and right frame) from a single rendered frame by using the depth buffer. For a smaller performance cost.
But I guess the additional hardware cost doesn't justify a cool feature like that.
A question for the mech engineers: why the back and forth wobble? My first thought when I saw that mechanism was "that sounds harder than it should be. Wouldn't a spinning 6 sided mirror work better?"
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[ 4.9 ms ] story [ 27.2 ms ] threadI picked one up cheap with some birthday money. It was fun for awhile, but I never developed the emotional attachment to it that I got to other tech like my NES, SNES, or Game Boy.
The Virtual Boy flopped for a very good reason: Not only were the games ugly because they were not in color, but it was very uncomfortable to play, and there was no "spectator" aspect to the games. The games also weren't very original, nor memorable.
(I do remember trying to strap mine to my head with my belt. That lasted about 3 minutes before I gave up and got bored of the games.) Honestly, I would have enjoyed the games more on a TV with red-green glasses, like shown in the article. (When I was a kid I loved everything and anything 3d.)
Did anyone fall in love with theirs? Is anyone really nostalgic for these games? Or is this something like CED, where the lore, because it's rare, makes it interesting even though it flopped for a very good reason?
I think that's more likely to mean projector-kun than project-kun, though it's hard to explain why I think so and it would be just a speculation.
I guess people don't want to wear things on their faces. And autostereoscopic screens, which don't require glasses, don't work so well for stationary TVs. The Nintendo 3DS was the only successful system with (auto)stereoscopic 3D so far. Unfortunately its first hardware iteration wasn't quite there yet, and the generally low resolution was an issue.
But I think it could easily have been an optional feature of the Nintendo Switch 2, if they had built in a movable lenticular lens array and a head tracking camera, just like in the "New Nintendo 3DS" (the original 3DS used a simpler but worse system).
To get to the original 1080p resolution, they would also have needed a screen with double the horizontal resolution (3840x1080 rather than 1920x1080), since autostereoscopic screens effectively halve the usable resolution. Games that don't support 3D would just show the same image for both eyes.
It could have been an optional feature even for games that support it, with a choice between a 30FPS 3D mode and a 60 FPS 2D mode, which comes down to the same amount of rendered pixels. An ML system similar to Nvidia's DLSS might even generate the 3D effect (left and right frame) from a single rendered frame by using the depth buffer. For a smaller performance cost.
But I guess the additional hardware cost doesn't justify a cool feature like that.
The screens are each a bar of micro LEDs. Each eye has a mirror that oscillates every frame to smear the LED bar across your field of view.
If you've ever seen those bike wheel displays, where the light-up spokes make a pattern when the wheel spins - it's that, but as a VR headset.
https://bsky.app/profile/wario64.bsky.social/post/3mdfvwdmdt...