> You can find modern reviews online.

Which I don't think do them real justice; it's like people growing up with modern cars doing a review of a Model T - a fair review you have to try to replicate everything around what is being reviewed, or at least have that mindset. A good review would use an old Pentium running Duke Nukem 3D with the patches meant for the VFX-1 (for the head tracking and "puck" usage).

> They had a lot of issues; mostly due to low resolution leading to motion sickness.

Most consumer HMDs of the time had low resolution, low field of view, contrast issues, etc. If they had any kind of tracking, coupled with the PC hardware and software of the era, the frame lag to changes would also cause simulator sickness issues.

One thing though - if you look at research papers from the era - there was discussion of what was termed a "looking past the pixels" effect.

That is - if you didn't focus in on the pixels themselves, the screen-door effects (terrible at those low resolutions, especially if the FOV was made large - which in most cases, it wasn't), and the small FOV - that psychologically (maybe neurologically too) some people would report seeing things at a better resolution and FOV.

It wasn't investigated too much - but what was thought was that for those participants, the mind would fill in the "gaps" using it's mental model - so long as they weren't focusing on those gaps. There are many other experiments that have been done that proves the mind does this in the "real world" - so in theory, that effect could be real. I suspect it is, but only if the imagery being displayed in the HMD matches some imagery the mind has seen before. For instance, my memory of playing Duke Nukem 3D in a VFX-1 setup seems far better than I am sure it was, but then, I had played the game a lot on a regular monitor at a higher resolution, so I had a "model" of it in my mind. It might be a different experience today, since I haven't played it in a long while - or if I played another game in that HMD that I hadn't played before.

> There were attempts at 3D web standards in the past. Who remembers VRML?!

Mark Pesce was behind that - among other pioneers:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_Pesce

These earlier attempts have led to and informed newer frameworks being played with today. VRML had its good and bad points; the main concept was to make VR as accessible to normal people as the Web was via HTML. But it really was a technology that was too early for the hardware that people had available (unless they had access to some high-end SGI machinery). That kinda gave it an unfair reputation, and was a part of the reason it never caught on well.

Today we have a range of other options, some more "standard" than others, but most things "VR" still seem to be cobbled together from "scratch", or at best layered on top of WebGL - while things like Three.js have made WebGL easier for people to use, it still isn't anything like typing in simple VRML.

Another note: One thing I liked about the VFX-1 that I haven't yet seen in current HMDs was the "flip up" design. It was meant so you could easily "enter and exit" a virtual world as you designed it. Today, it may not really be needed as much as resolutions and FOV increase in HMDs - instead, we're slowing seeing the concept of "recreate the monitor inside the HMD" kind of approach. But I still thought the concept was interesting, and I was kinda surprised that Oculus didn't do something similar, since Palmer Luckey hacked the VFX-1 to death on the 3DMTBS forums prior to the kickstarter.