Virtual Reality: changing games or game changer?

Virtual reality technology is becoming a hot property. Here Tyler Greerasks whether it will really have a reach beyond video games.

One day back in the early 90s I switched off the Sega Mega Drive and got myself along to an exhibition touting itself as the new frontier in gaming: virtual reality. Strapped in to a cumbersome, heavy piece of machinery I played Dactyl Nightmare, a dreadful Cubist nightmare which left me disoriented, ill, and disappointed for the state of the machine-human relationship.

Not fast enough could I return to Sonic the Hedgehog and my new-found appreciation for the human-couch relationship.

Fast forward 20 years and both VR and I are in a much better place, though only one of us is the star attraction of the 2015 Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas. (Spoiler alert: it ain’t me). Yet for many of us, VR still sits alongside hover-boards and baldness cures: a sci-fi pipedream unlikely to be troubling us anytime soon.