CES 2016: cars, virtual reality and a lot of hype

The vast Consumer Electronics Show traditionally predicts the hit technologies of the year to come - but is a sales event really the best predictor of consumer demand?

Twenty years almost to the day, on 6 January 1995, Nintendo revealed its new Virtual Boy virtual reality headset at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas. Technologists had been experimenting with virtual reality since the 1960s, but the headset was a significant milestone by the then thriving Japanese games company. The press were unwilling to write off anything by Nintendo, but VR aficionados were not convinced. And as it turns out, they were right: players complained of dizziness, nausea and headaches and Nintendo sold only 770,000 - a tenth of predicted sales. The device was canned.

"When Virtual Boy was introduced there was a lot of excitement about virtual reality and augmented reality as part of the future of gaming, but it didn't happen that way for a variety of reasons," said Regina Joseph, a forecasting expert and lead at New York University's Future Lab. "The technology simply wasn't at the same level as it is now, and there were some fundamental ergonomic issues. The hype concentrated in the press, and in a press run by fanboys, often doesn't pan out. History is littered with the corpses of devices, projects and ideas that people got behind in a big way but that failed."