Atari Jaguar VR headset

This was probably the most hyped up device Atari ever made for the Jaguar. It's the device every Jag fan wish they had. It would've practically made the Jaguar a VR arcade. Had it been released, things may have been different for the Jag. But for better or worse? You'll decide in a minute...

Note: Comments later on things spoken of on the specs table are indicated by 1's and 2's>

Jaguar VR specs
Head Mounted Display(HMD)
 Less than 1 lb., Two degrees of freedom tracking, stereo sound, 52° horizontal by 40° vertical field of view. Uses a single 0.7" TFT active matrix color LCD using 104,000 pixels
Optical System Custom designed pupil projection with aspheric lenses, beam splitters, mirrors and thin film coatings. Large exit pupil size of 5mm x 14mm. Can be used by anyone with an interpupiliary distance between 45mm and 70mm
Tracking System Uses "V-Trak"*, the fastest tracker ever developed for the consumer market, with a sample rate of 250 Hz and a lagtime of only 4 milliseconds(4X faster than Virtuality's $60,000 arcade system).
Optional joystick Offers 6° of freedom allowing for greater control over movements in the virtual world.2 Jaguar VR games can also be played with the standard Jaguar game controller.
Docking Station Houses the "V-Trak" position sensing system, a joystick interface and a high speed communications link to the Jaguar for transferring audio and visual tracking data.

Sounds great huh? Phenominal in fact. But, the Jaguar VR wasn't exactly without flaws. 1The processors in the headset were too slow in communicating with the "V-Trak", so the frame rate wasn't fast enough for the games. Either that, or the programmers couldn't handle the architecture correctly, thus creating slowdown. And when there's slowdown ina VR headset, you start getting the horrible nauseating feeling. Also, Virtuality, the group working on the set, promised a lot of awesome things for the set, things that weren't possible at the time. They were just looking for the money. All-in-all, some people who have played the VR set have loved it, while a couple went as far as saying it was worse than the Virtual Boy, namely a few people on the inside of Atari. Because of these things and just the regular Tramiel philosophy shot the headset down. So we won't know exactly how the headset performs until one of us can get our hands on it. Of course, that'll be as easy as finding an Atari Cosmo that actually works.

A few other things about the headset.2There was a picture of the Jag VR joystick I saw once, but I don't remember where. It looked like a gun that fit for your fingers. Looked pretty cool.

Also, it had about three or four known games for it. Missle Command 3D was one that actually made it to the market(and is rumored to still have VR code in it), then three others: a Doom type game used to showcase the headset(Zone Hunter?), Gravon, a helicopter fighting game that used 24-bit true color and gourdard shaded polygons. I think it may have networked. Then Zone Hunter, which either is that Doom type game, or is something else. I've heard rumors before that Dactyl Joust supported the headset, but those are just rumors- as many things are with the headset...:)
By Adam Pratt 1