Virtual Reality (VR) has been around for decades but only in 2016 it’s blown up to be a potentially lucrative industry. The trifecta of VR headsets for gaming, the Oculus Rift, the HTC Vive and Sony’s Playstation VR, all launched this year, has been instrumental to its current rise, but VR is also being explored in the mobile space and various other areas. As such, it’s the right time for the big names in VR form an association to further advance VR technology by developing practices and dialogue among them.
The Global Virtual Reality Association (GVRA) consists of Acer Starbreeze (joint venture between Acer and game publisher/developer Starbreeze), Google, HTC VIVE (HTC’s recent new branch for VR), Facebook’s Oculus, Samsung, and Sony Interactive Entertainment. That’s a lot of major names that are all investing in VR, so the idea of them sharing some ideas together to tackle issues in VR is something to look forward to.
Most headsets we have tried- namely the HTC Vive and PS VR– have mostly solved the issue of head tracking and reducing motion sickness- a major setback that stopped VR from being a big thing decades ago, but there’s new issues to discuss as VR tech has now become consumer products. Like a standard size for room-sized VR, or how to portray movement in VR aside from using an analog stick. Or maybe discuss about how to cut costs make cheaper headsets.
While gaming certainly has help rapidly advance this latest push of the VR craze, the technology can be beneficial in other fields like education and healthcare. The GVRA will be dedicated to do research, develop and share best practices on how to do VR that benefits the society as well as ensuring VR is here to stay unlike its past failures. Let’s hope it works out and prevent the horrors of VR tech portrayed in Sword Art Online will not be a reality.