Creating Augmented and Virtual Realities

Foreword

In the 2016 Design in Tech Report, I referred to a November 1993 Wired article penned by my former boss MIT Media Lab Founder Nicholas Negroponte on the topic of virtual realities (VR). In his inimitable fashion, Nicholas writes:

Neophytes have a mistaken sense that VR is very new because the press just learned about it. It is not. Almost 25 years ago, Ivan Sutherland developed, with support from ARPA, the first surprisingly advanced VR system. This may not be astonishing to old-timers, because Ivan seems to have had half the good ideas in computer science. However, Ivan’s idea is now very affordable. One company, whose name I am obliged to omit, will soon introduce a VR display system with a parts cost of less than US $25.

If you stop for a second and think about how this was written back in 1993, and then consider how that was just over 25 years ago, it should give you a bit of pause. Furthermore, consider how as a good thought leader (and investor), Negroponte teases a startup that he personally seed-funded and that was most certainly set to reshape the future. Does that sound familiar to you at all here in the 21st century from similar movers and shakers today in the Valley?

But different from the latest and greatest technology pundit out there, I’ve found most of Negroponte’s predictions to have come true—even his most outlandish and audacious ones. For example, is there really a VR system out there right now today that costs less than $25? Certainly—but only when ...