VIRTUAL REALITY WANTS TO RULE VIDEO GAMES.

Soon you'll don a high-tech headset as easily as you reach for your controller. Watch for blockbuster launches in the year ahead that pave the way to the brave new virtual world. Facebook and Valve lead the charge.

Some of the greatest rivalries have come out of the video game industry: Midway's Space Invaders against Atari's Asteroids. Nintendo's Mario versus Sega's Sonic the Hedgehog. Microsoft's Halo against Sony's God of War.
Now the next great battle for leadership of the video game industry is starting. And it's between companies most people have never heard of over a technology few have even tried: virtual reality.

In the past year, nearly every major tech company has announced or hinted at plans to take real steps into the emerging market for VR, which immerses goggle-wearing users in three-dimensional worlds -- and often feature gee-whiz graphics tied to the hottest games. Facebook surprised the industry with its $2 billion buyout of VR headset maker Oculus in March 2014. Google unveiled its "Cardboard" VR headset for smartphones. Apple filed and was awarded a patent for VR technology. 

Hello VR

Virtual reality was once the stuff of science fiction. Movies like Walt Disney's "Tron," New Line Cinema's "The Lawnmower Man" and Warner Bros. "The Matrix" introduced audiences to simulated, computerized worlds, completely unlike the one we live in.
Characters who visited these worlds, either by being transported into them or by seeing and interacting with them using head-mounted goggles and a set of controllers, soon learned they could manipulate and change the environment, just like a computer program.
The message: VR offers limitless potential for you to visit, explore or be part of the action.
But turning fiction into reality is no simple trick. Jaron Lanier, a visionary game developer, helped to popularize the term "virtual reality" in the 1980s and began selling headsets and specially designed gloves through a company he founded called VPL Research. VPL went bankrupt.
Game maker Nintendo attempted to field its own VR headset in the 1990s called "Virtual Boy," which was designed to be kept on a table with a stand. Players who looked through the headset were shown games with simple visuals and played in a black-and red-colored 3D world that surrounded them. Virtual Boy wasn't compelling enough to entice customers though, and the project was discontinued within a year.
Other attempts, such as specialized arcade games like Pac-Man VR, were deemed too clunky and expensive for mainstream audiences.
Oculus VR changed all that. In 2012, a teenage tinkerer named Palmer Luckey unveiled a device called the Oculus Rift, a next-generation headset built with modern parts, including a smartphone's screen. Put on a pair of Oculus goggles, and the world inside is far different from what Nintendo offered. You can visit realistic Tuscan villages, pilot a spaceship in an epic dogfight and (attempt to) dodge bullets fired by men in a hallway. Oculus showed how VR can make users see the world from the eyes of a tiny animal scampering through a rainforest or from the perspective of a monster stomping through a city.
Oh, and it's cheap. Oculus sells prototypes of its Rift goggles for $349 apiece.
Luckey's tech worked so well that the industry started viewing VR as an opportunity rather than a novelty. It also captured the attention of Facebook and CEO Mark Zuckerberg.