Dawn of the Geeks

The Head Mounted Virtual Boy

The web-site dates to 1999 but I’m pretty sure it was up long before that in various forms. It was actually my first claim to fame: a practical and comfortable way to make the Virtual Boy head mounted. Even Nintendo visited my site and I was featured on some Asian hacker site and got bombarded with hits.

It’s here just for historical purposes now. The VB is quite dead. At best it’s the pong of consumer level virtual reality game systems. People seem to be perfectly content with 2D screens so I’m not so sure it’s going to be a short time before we see some kind of advanced version that’s actually head mounted and full color. What I’d like to see is console systems with dual video outs so it’s possible to buy an HMD accessory to play the games in 3D. The biggest mistake Nintendo made was combining the display with the system itself. That’s what made it unwearable. What I found out though is that it was necessary for the timing of the mirrors. I tried lengthening the wires and the mirrors couldn’t sync up.

If they had used standard RCA jacks and real LCD screens that wouldn’t have been an issue.