I don't think they were a missed opportunity. In order for them to 'miss' they had to be 'possible' which they haven't been for a long time. Its only lately where various things have come together to get close. I have followed the 'head mounted display' technology closely since its early inception in the mid-90's as a means of providing military pilots with situational awareness.
The first problem with head mounted displays was resolution. Both in color space and in pixel space. Early displays were monochrome (either green or red based on LED display drivers) and had a roughly 256 x 256 dot pitch. It was ok for targeting reticules and basic instrumentation display (like an artificial horizon). Early work also wanted transparency (look through) displays because there wasn't a way to display what you were looking at in enough fidelity to do both the visual field and the indicator field.
Later a company called Colorado Micro Displays (CMD) came to market and started offering color, but 320 x 200 was the best resolution they could do. Higher resolution displays cost tens of thousands of dollars and were essentially hand crafted out of unobtainum. Direct retinal illumination displays attempted to get past strict display resolution issues (a friend of mine worked on one of the x-y positioning device for doing this, it had 500 angstrom repeatability! And was, as expected, insanely expensive)
It really hasn't been until recently when DLP type systems at sufficient resolution to eliminate the x-y type beam director have come to market. Combined with better LED phosphors to bring the cost of an RGB display with better than VGA (640 x 480) resolution into something practical.
The incessant push to higher resolution phone screens has created the capability to make opaque but high resolution screens which can enable something like the Oculus Rift type displays. That requirement stems from how far away from the eyes you have to put the screen and thus the torque moment that is applied to your head. There was a great system at NASA which used 10" displays but the 'head mounted' part was more like sticking your head into some weird steadycam kind of device.
Finally there is the challenge of both high fidelity and high frequency head orientation technologies. Prior to about 2005 the best you could do was a laser gyro for motion and an accelerometer for inertial reference. Doing that at the necessary frequency (typically 1000 updates per second) didn't become cost effective until about 2009.
Now however, many of the technologies have finally matured to the point where OR can be done in small quantities for perhaps $2K/unit.
A 'game console' is struggles if it costs more then $300. So as a 'controller' option, and even as the 'whole console' option, these sorts of glasses are still about 3 - 5 years from hitting a price point that makes them the 'killer' peripheral. And of course because they aren't here yet, they can't really have 'missed' :-)
$2K/unit? That's a gigantic overestimate. High quality head tracking is practically free today thanks to advances in cameras and MEMS sensors; you don't need laser gyros. The Oculus Rift costs $300, and is almost good enough for a home console. The only major improvement needed is a better display, which needn't cost more if sourced in quantities large enough, which Sony or Microsoft could definitely do. $500 for a complete system with display, controller, and console is definitely achievable, and that's the price point the PS3 started at. VR is absolutely feasible today.
As I said further downthread, I think a lot of people got disillusioned with VR because there's a lot of crappy hardware out there. Even the expensive stuff is crap. I tried Canon's augmented reality system at SIGGRAPH last year and the latency and FOV were awful, despite the $120,000 cost. But it doesn't have to be that way, and the Oculus Rift is the proof.
Nintendo saw the possibility of doing something new with the Wii, using then-new technology (MEMS sensors, tiny low-power cameras) to make an old, lame, expensive concept (motion control) work for the mass market, and was rewarded handsomely for it. If someone had that foresight with VR they could be making a killing right now.
I too look forward to the OR system shipping. Go through the latest parts list for the OR device and check on availability 2 years ago. Things are moving along and that is great, they weren't there when Nintendo was using MEMS accelerometers and CMOS camera modules in their remote.
The first problem with head mounted displays was resolution. Both in color space and in pixel space. Early displays were monochrome (either green or red based on LED display drivers) and had a roughly 256 x 256 dot pitch. It was ok for targeting reticules and basic instrumentation display (like an artificial horizon). Early work also wanted transparency (look through) displays because there wasn't a way to display what you were looking at in enough fidelity to do both the visual field and the indicator field.
Later a company called Colorado Micro Displays (CMD) came to market and started offering color, but 320 x 200 was the best resolution they could do. Higher resolution displays cost tens of thousands of dollars and were essentially hand crafted out of unobtainum. Direct retinal illumination displays attempted to get past strict display resolution issues (a friend of mine worked on one of the x-y positioning device for doing this, it had 500 angstrom repeatability! And was, as expected, insanely expensive)
It really hasn't been until recently when DLP type systems at sufficient resolution to eliminate the x-y type beam director have come to market. Combined with better LED phosphors to bring the cost of an RGB display with better than VGA (640 x 480) resolution into something practical.
The incessant push to higher resolution phone screens has created the capability to make opaque but high resolution screens which can enable something like the Oculus Rift type displays. That requirement stems from how far away from the eyes you have to put the screen and thus the torque moment that is applied to your head. There was a great system at NASA which used 10" displays but the 'head mounted' part was more like sticking your head into some weird steadycam kind of device.
Finally there is the challenge of both high fidelity and high frequency head orientation technologies. Prior to about 2005 the best you could do was a laser gyro for motion and an accelerometer for inertial reference. Doing that at the necessary frequency (typically 1000 updates per second) didn't become cost effective until about 2009.
Now however, many of the technologies have finally matured to the point where OR can be done in small quantities for perhaps $2K/unit.
A 'game console' is struggles if it costs more then $300. So as a 'controller' option, and even as the 'whole console' option, these sorts of glasses are still about 3 - 5 years from hitting a price point that makes them the 'killer' peripheral. And of course because they aren't here yet, they can't really have 'missed' :-)