About: The Division system was around £70,000 new and display a 10 thousand polygon virtual world at 10 fps – the Rift and Hydra together were about £300 and modern systems can display a million polygon VR world at 60 fps and nine times the resolution. What a difference twenty years makes. The Division system is a standing, walking about system, and designed for a room with about a 10’ radius to move in, there’s nothing to turn your body like a joystick, you just turn your body – the hand controller design reflects this too – it’s a point and grab / shoot thing, not a movement controller with joysticks. The system was very complex to set up and only ran the software designed for it – VR systems were fully integrated, so no third party software, but an immersive 3D world builder, a drag and drop scenegraph builder with scripting, format converters and a C API.
Division dVisor Specs and Info…
Device: Division dVisor (The Division system), (dVisor HMD)
Manufacturer: Division
Announced Date: Unknown
Release Date: June 1993
Launch Price: $95,000 (£69,729)
Device Type: VR Headset (PC Powered)
Display: X2 4 inch LCD’s at 385 x 119 (Per Eye)
Diagonal Field of View(FOV): 110°
Refresh Rate: 10 Hz
Weight: Unknown
CPU: N/A
GPU: N/A
Battery: N/A
Tracking: 3 DoF Non-positional (Gyroscope Based)
Controllers: 3D Mouse
Our Thoughts: The Division dVisor virtual reality headset costs more than a 4 bedroom house available at the same time and could only display about 10,000 polygons and a 10 frames per second display rate. You did have the ability to move around a virtual room thanks to the full motion tracking capabilities it had.
It was not made for the video games market like many other headsets released at the same time. This was for professional use and it had professional capabilities. Back in 1993 when it was first released there were many other headsets that had far better tech behind them which meant this history maker kind of got sideswiped. But it’s always good to remember these history headsets of VR to know how hard and how far the VR journey has taken us.
Sources used…
- https://medium.com/virtual-reality/virtual-reality-1993-and-2013-1f503273e24a/