The Virtual Yellow House: Experimental tangling with virtual reality

Fad or future, 2016 is the year virtual reality (VR) and augmented reality began to enter the mainstream consumer marketplace with serious momentum. That is not to suggest that the Oculus Rift, the Samsung Galaxy, or the HTC Vive are essential new technologies. These are all iterations of a long line of devices, pictorial techniques, and representational strategies for assembling a convincing embodied experience of three-dimensional (3-D) space and movement, which have been proposed, developed, and sold over the previous century. Neither does it suggest that consumers are at all convinced by the promise of VR or consider the head-mounted display as an inevitable way of using screens and interacting with computational devices, especially given the restricting buy-in cost for early adopters.