Here are three goals for "good VR" from David Levitt, with whom I work at Pantomime Corporation, and who used to work on VR at VPL:
http://pantomimecorp.com/pantomime-technology/virtual-realit...
When Pantomime co-founder Levitt was a research scientist and product manager with VPL Research, the inventors of virtual reality, they had three prerequisites for a VR system:
1) a way to reach in, in 3D
2) shared reality — support for multiple users and viewpoints
3) graphically and physically realistic worlds
VPL offered a DataGlove to provide 3D input, while its flagship Reality Built for Two VR product offered networked multi-person worlds. Expensive graphics computers and custom hardware brought the full 1992 price to $500,000, which only a few huge corporations could afford.
When Dr. Levitt joined VPL, thanks to an amazing infrastructure by lead VPL engineer Chuck Blanchard, he added realistic gravity, collisions, and throwing a ball into the VR system for physical realism.
But two decades later, the public and technologists have become so impatient that the new systems calling themselves VR have punted even on the core original criteria.
Head-mounted systems like the Oculus Rift offer no way to reach in. In demos, visitors twiddle a 1980s style game joystick. And users don’t natively network — in an Oculus demonstration you don’t see the other users in the VR world — not even the other players sitting alongside you in the demo.
David asked Facebook’s VP of Infrastructure Engineering Jay Parikh this revealing question about Facebook's acquisition of Oculus VR:
http://pantomimecorp.com/2014/06/10/facebook-vp-to-pantomime...
David Levitt: "I work in Virtual Reality, and everyone’s wondering what you can say about your acquisition of Oculus VR. In particular, I’ve had demos of it: I could look around but I couldn’t reach in. Do you have solutions for that that you can talk about?"
Jay Parikh: “You can’t interact with anything. These are big, hard problems … what you do with your hands, because you can’t do anything with your hands — or it’s hard to be using a controller when you can’t see your hands and you have the goggles on — these are problems we have to solve in a good and seamless way.”
More on the VPL DataGlove:
http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/630181/virtual-rea...
Zimmerman’s glove would have the greatest impact. He had been thinking for years about constructing an interface device for musicians based on the common practice of playing “air guitar”—in particular, a glove capable of tracking hand and finger movements could be used to control instruments such as electronic synthesizers. He patented an optical flex-sensing device (which used light-conducting fibres) in 1982, one year after Grimes patented his glove-based computer interface device. By then, Zimmerman was working at the Atari Research Center in Sunnyvale, California, along with Scott Fisher, Brenda Laurel, and other VR researchers who would be active during the 1980s and beyond. Jaron Lanier, another researcher at Atari, shared Zimmerman’s interest in electronic music. Beginning in 1983, they worked together on improving the design of the data glove, and in 1985 they left Atari to start up VPL Research; its first commercial product was the VPL DataGlove.
By 1985, Fisher had also left Atari to join NASA’s Ames Research Center at Moffett Field, California, as founding director of the Virtual Environment Workstation (VIEW) project. The VIEW project put together a package of objectives that summarized previous work on artificial environments, ranging from creation of multisensory and immersive “virtual environment workstations” to telepresence and teleoperation applications. Influenced by a range of prior projects that included Sensorama, flight simulators, and arcade rides, and surprised by the expense of the air force’s Darth Vader helmets, Fisher’s group focused on building low-cost, personal simulation environments. While the objective of NASA was to develop telerobotics for automated space stations in future planetary exploration, the group also considered the workstation’s use for entertainment, scientific, and educational purposes. The VIEW workstation, called the Virtual Visual Environment Display when completed in 1985, established a standard suite of VR technology that included a stereoscopic head-coupled display, head tracker, speech recognition, computer-generated imagery, data glove, and 3-D audio technology.
The VPL DataGlove was brought to market in 1987, and in October of that year it appeared on the cover of Scientific American (see photograph). VPL also spawned a full-body, motion-tracking system called the DataSuit, a head-mounted display called the EyePhone, and a shared VR system for two people called RB2 (“Reality Built for Two”). VPL declared June 7, 1989, “Virtual Reality Day.” On that day, both VPL and Autodesk publicly demonstrated the first commercial VR systems. The Autodesk VR CAD (computer-aided design) system was based on VPL’s RB2 technology but was scaled down for operation on personal computers. The marketing splash introduced Lanier’s new term virtual reality as a realization of “cyberspace,” a concept introduced in science fiction writer William Gibson’s Neuromancer in 1984. Lanier, the dreadlocked chief executive officer of VPL, became the public celebrity of the new VR industry, while announcements by Autodesk and VPL let loose a torrent of enthusiasm, speculation, and marketing hype. Soon it seemed that VR was everywhere, from the Mattel/Nintendo PowerGlove (1989) to the HMD in the movie The Lawnmower Man (1992), the Nintendo VirtualBoy game system (1995), and the television series VR5 (1995).