Recently, a malady called “Oculus face” has come to the
fore. I envisioned Dick Tracy speaking
into his two-way wrist radio: “Good news chief … we’ve cornered B.O. Plenty,
Breathless Mahoney and Oculus Face at a warehouse down by the docks … bringing
them in for questioning.”
The ailment
comes from wearing the Oculus Rift virtual reality headset, which tends to
leave red marks on a user’s face. The marks disappear – eventually. Whether
other VR headsets from HTC, Sony, Google and Samsung will cause the same problem
remains to be determined.
But bigger
issues are afoot. Noting that VR leaves some gamers feeling sick, the DailyMail of London notes: The
low-latency headsets from Oculus, HTC and Sony are intended to right the
nausea-inducing wrongs of their VR predecessors from 20 years ago, but many
users still report feeling woozy after using souped-up systems. … There’s still
concern the immersive technology may force players to lose more than a battle
with an alien. They could also lose their lunch.
The $600
Oculus headsets require a high-end PC. The people testing them now are
journalists and the original Kickstarter funders of the company, which was
acquired by Facebook in 2014 for $2 billion. The market for VR seems about to
explode; not surprisingly the porn industry seems interested.
Detective
Dick Tracy would have no use for VR, but he was an early adopter of forensic
science and gadgets, including the two-way wrist radio, decades ahead of its
time. He first appeared in a comic strip in 1931, the creation of Chester
Gould, who retired in 1977. Dick has been portrayed on radio and in film, and
the comic strip continues to this day in the dwindling number of newspapers
that carry comics.
Check out
the trailer for “Brainstorm,” a 1983 movie about VR:
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