Video games have always had interesting gimmicks that have come and gone, some have stayed such as the idea of home consoles, portable gaming, and motion controls. Motion controls such as the original Wii’s controls, introduced the first motion controls to video games, they ended up sticking and now Xbox and Sony have unveiled their own rendition of motion controls being Xbox Kinect and PlayStation Move. Motion controls are just one of those gimmicks that have stuck around, and has been around since the dawn of the NES era but were shrugged off because of the technology limitations.

One of the newer things that is coming back from the dead is virtual reality gaming. VR has been around since the Nintendo Virtual Boy in 1995. The Virtual Boy introduced this idea, and was just an experiment to see how such a revelation would go down. Of course those who know what the virtual boy was will know how big of a failure it was; the sales were not that bad it was the amount of money that had to be paid out to pay for injuries caused by exposure to the headset that came with the virtual boy. Most of the injuries caused by the headset being extreme eyestrain, nausea, and blindness; although it hurt Nintendo really bad with the release of such a console, it encourage many to do what Nintendo did but better.

Now VR is starting to become big, many companies such as Oculus are some of the first to try to modernize VR for gaming like it was attempted in 1995. Virtual reality uses 360 gyroscopic controls in a headset to simulate what a real person’s field of vision would appear like, whilst also projecting images separately into both eyes to simulate a real, perceptive type environment that would allow users to use the same cognizance they would be able to use in real life.

This time VR is more self-aware and doesn’t shy away from the inevitable possibility of injury. Obviously dizziness is a common side effect of VR because of the in-your-face type movement. VR is expanding more from video games into training for many things, such as NASA’s training and Fire Rescue training.

Even though this may just be another gimmick when paired with motion controls, allow for an immersive feeling that many could find themselves lost in the virtual reality.