Meant to be Seen

Despite ridiculous claims to the contrary, we are nowhere near the day when we can walk into the equivalent of Star Trek’s Holodeck and experience a truly multisensory computer-generated reality.

By Robert Stone

Anyone who reads the technology news can’t have failed to notice a certain preoccupation in the past couple of years on the part of developers to bring viewers close to the action of TV, films and computer games through virtual reality. Every other day, it seems, we hear of yet another allegedly ground-breaking solution in the quest for “immersion”. The next person to claim to have invented a Star-Trek-like Holodeck is going to get a Vulcan neck pinch from me.

Frustratingly, this marketing hype actually seems to be working so well that VR headsets, be they binocular, biocular or monocular (such as Google’s Glass), have become a "must have" item. Even in traditionally sceptical and risk-averse sectors such as defence, aerospace, energy and education, they are fast becoming de rigeur in training exercises.

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