Virtual Reality Startups Look Back to the Future

Thirty years after the first wave of virtual reality, new startups are determined to take it mainstream.

Its been almost 30 years since the computer scientist Jaron Lanier formed VPL Research, the first company to sell the high-tech goggles and gloves that once defined humanitys concept of where technology might soon take our species. In the late-1980s, a person could pull on a $100,000 head-mounted display and electronic gauntlet and fool their brain into thinking they had stepped inside the simulated space rendered on the screen.