Sega VR

[Justin]

@RadioPoultry and I got into a conversation in the chatroom last night about Sega VR, the long lost virtual reality headset initially developed for the Sega Genesis, and later for the Saturn and arcade machines. There hasn't been a lot of info about the Sega VR, although it appears a bit more info has surfaced in recent years.

I remember seeing the Sega VR in video game magazines such as GamePro and Sega Visions the fall of 1993. It was right around the same time the Jaguar was about to drop, and although I was excited to see a Sega VR headset for the Genesis I was also hoping the Jag VR headset would trounce it. At the time it seemed to me that the Atari Jaguar would be a more advanced system that could better handle the demands of VR and would offer better games. However I've read the Sega VR was originally intended to be used with Sega Genesis games like Virtua Racing, which no doubt would've been an incredible experience. At least that's what you'd perceive it to be.

What I remember hearing at the time was the Sega VR was delayed, and later canceled primarily due to people being disappointed in the actual experience not living up to what they had expected. This allegedly resulted from a combination of factors, namely: 1.) Insufficient motion tracking, 2.) focus group participants experiencing dizziness and motion sickness from gameplay longer than 20 mins, and 3.) poor video quality which severely hindered the experience from being truly immersive due to cost-effective low resolution screens, and the feel that you were looking at a moving movie screen from the back row, as opposed to being enveloped in an imax-like virtual environment. Maybe had the Sega VR been released McWill would have a nice screen mod for it 😉

I remember by the fall of 1994 all VR talk had moved to Virtuality and the Atari Jaguar VR headset, and everything coming out of Sega at the time was about 32x and Saturn, with Genesis beginning to look more and more like the generation that was about to be left behind. More on the Sega VR can be found in this recent article from DesignNews:

 

From: DesignNews by Chris Wiltz

The Story of Sega VR: Sega's Failed Virtual Reality Headset

In 1991 video game giant Sega tasked its engineers with creating what would have been the first consumer VR headset. But the Sega VR was never released. Here's why.

https://www.designnews.com/electronics-test/story-sega-vr-segas-failed-virtual-reality-headset/74451237860349