There’s only one difference: the pace of change is significantly faster now than it was in the 80s and 90s. Every area of immersive tech, or XR, will undergo the same transformation in the coming decades. And it’s only going to get better.Īs you look at these images, you can see them as a roadmap for augmented and virtual reality.
As a flatscreen computer simulation, Flight Simulator 2020 achieves a breathtaking level of fidelity and accuracy. More or less.įast forward through decades of development (with Microsoft shutting down the project and bringing it back to life), we have the 2020 version with its photorealistic reproduction of New York City’s buildings and monuments, with a beautifully rendered sky reflected in the surface of the water. NYC had buildings that approximated a few well-known landmarks with non-volumetric clouds in the distance. Microsoft Flight Simulator 2.10 for IBM PC, flying over the Empire State Building with the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center in the distance, 1984.īy 1996, Flight Simulator for Windows 95 finally achieved a degree of realism that vaguely looked like the real thing. Ah, the abundant gifts of early technology.
Here is a screenshot of version 2 in 1984, a year after PC Magazine praised version 1 as “extraordinarily realistic … a classic program, unique in the market.” The scenes were composed of four (yes, four!) glorious colors and four hatched tones if you hooked it up to a “color composite” monitor (i.e., a TV), you could get up to 15 colors. Its history is an amazing time capsule of the evolution of computer graphics – from the blocky renderings of the early versions to today’s deeply realistic simulation – and it’s soon to become a VR experience. At that age, it even predates Windows by three years. At 38 years old, the remarkable simulation is the company’s longest-running software product line. Microsoft’s Flight Simulator in VR arrives this December.
0 kommentar(er)
