Nintendo Virtual Boy (1995): what it was, and what actually went wrong

The Virtual Boy, designed by Gunpei Yokoi's team, was released in Japan in July 1995 and North America in August 1995. It was discontinued within about a year, and roughly 770,000 units were sold. Only 22 games were released for it. The hardware - A tabletop stereoscopic display on a bipod stand, not a headset. You pressed your face to the eyepieces. - Red LEDs only. Each eye had a single vertical column of LEDs, and an oscillating mirror swept it across the field of view to build the image. Red LEDs were chosen because they were cheap and power-efficient at the time. - No head tracking at all. It was a 3D display, not virtual reality in the sense of a world that stays fixed as you move. What went wrong - Price and positioning: marketed as portable but unusable while moving. - Comfort: the posture was awkward, and many users reported eye strain and headaches. Nintendo built in an automatic pause reminder and warnings for young children. - The red-on-black image could not show colour, which made it hard to sell next to colour consoles. - Few strong games, partly because the release was rushed while the company's attention was on the Nintendo 64. What it got right The stereoscopic depth genuinely worked, and games designed around depth (Red Alarm, Mario's Tennis, Virtual Boy Wario Land) showed it. The display technique of a scanned line of LEDs and a mirror was clever engineering under cost constraints. The lesson Depth alone is not presence. Tracking the head, the thing Sutherland's 1968 display already did, was the missing piece, and it was the piece that took the industry another two decades to make affordable. Sources: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virtual_Boy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gunpei_Yokoi