Or 70's. I was born in 81 so I may not know what it was but if you were born earlier and understood what it was I would imagine you would drop a duece in your pants. Lol.
This is an interesting paradox. Would it have been possible for us to build VR units back in the 80s? I know that they were on Tomorrow's World TV seen here (1986) and they said they are being used for architects and Fire Fighting scenarios. They used them to design Control Rooms for Nuclear Power Stations too in the 80s. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T2CYLlSn1gA
There were head mounted displays in the 90s though the graphics were crude by today's standards. I think to have seen something like the Go in the 70s would have been truely mind blowing. CRTs were the primary display technology and they were used to display text. There were vector displays that were derivatives of o-scopes. With the invention of LCD shutter goggles in the late 80s or early 90s, 3D animations could be viewed on computer monitors. Soon after you started seeing head mounted displays using LCD technology. I remember seeing what was considered break-through technology demonstrated at SIGGRAPH in Anaheim in 1993. There were film/video anaglyphs much earlier that amazed audiances of the day but nothing as neat as the Go.
I was an applications engineer for Vital Images, Inc. from 1991 to 1998. We had a close working relationship with Silicon Graphics one of the leading manufacturers of graphics workstations in the day. Our software, Voxelview was used to visualize volumetric data from confocal microscopes, CT, NMR & MRI scanners and geophysical seismic surveys among other things as a 3D rendering. An additional program VoxelAnimator could generate sequences of stereo image pairs that when played sequentially on a monitor could be free fused and seen as a 3D projection. Free fusion is a technique whereby the person viewing a stereo pair allows their eyes to individually focus on two different images. The technique results in a very realistic appearing 3D image.
That suit was built in 1989. If I'd seen the Go back then I would have thought, "hey, they finally made VR practical." Which is pretty much what I thought in 2018 when I bought one.
I would think the same as I do now because if it the Oculus Go was available in the 70's or 80's, it would mean that the tech had already reached that stage.. What I'd like to know is what going to happen 30 years from now. That would be more of a surprise..