In 1995, Japanese gaming company Nintendo released Virtual Boy, one of the earliest virtual reality gaming systems.

Virtual Boy, designed by Gunpei Yokoi who had also designed Game Boy for Nintendo, was a massive flop. It was Nintendo’s worst- selling console after the Nintendo 64 Disc Drive, which was never released outside of Japan.

By March 1996, Nintendo had stopped support for Virtual Boy and Yokoi left Nintendo. Yokoi died in 1997 in a traffic accident.

Now, 20 years after the failure of Virtual Boy, gaming will test the waters of virtual reality once again. Sony, HTC and Facebook-owned Oculus are expected to soon release headsets all designed to simulate a 3-D virtual world.

“VR is a whole new concept and can bring a new range of people into gaming,” said John Alsbrooks, co-founder of The Geek Gathering annual convention held in Sheffield.

“There will be a lot of bugs to iron out, but let’s be honest, any step in that direction is going to be amazing.”

Oculus was Kickstarted in 2012 to produce its VR console, the Oculus Rift. It was bought by Facebook for $2 billion in 2014.

Samsung’s Gear VR headset, made in conjunction with Oculus, was released in December. It’s a $100 headset with a gyroscope and accelerometer to detect head movement that uses a smart phone as its screen.

Early trends look promising, the Associated Press reports. The $100 Gear VR briefly sold out at many retailers. Research firm TrendForce projects sales of 14 million VR devices in 2016, mostly for gaming.

But that doesn’t mean virtual reality is a sure thing. Justin Pierce, owner of For The Win game store in Seven Points in Florence, said he’s been following virtual reality for years and while he’s excited for its potential, he expects VR to take a few years to get fully off the ground.

“It’s something people are going to have to get used to,” he said. “It’s not something a lot of people will buy into right away. It’s different, and there’s a heavy cost of entry with what expenses are concerned. From a gaming point of view, a lot of stuff that’s coming out right away won’t be all that impressive — tech demos turned into games.”

Pierce said it could be 2017 or 2018 before there is a game or software that is going to drive people to buy a VR headset.

“There was a ‘Minecraft’ demo they did at E3 and that was really impressive, but even then you could tell it was a ways away from being fully playable,” he said. “But the concept was great.”

Consumers also will have to make sure they own compatible hardware — a strong enough PC for the Oculus Rift or a PlayStation 4 for Sony’s PlayStation VR. HTC’s Vive, made in conjunction with PC gaming giant Valve plans to announce more information on their headset this month.

Prices for these systems haven’t been announced yet, though most are likely to cost at least a few hundred dollars.

“I think it’s really close,” Alsbrooks said. “I still think there will be some snags in it. But it’s going to be leap years above what it was before.

“It’s something I’ll get into as long as the value of the dollar is there. I don’t want it to cost me an arm and a leg.”

Alsbrooks also said virtual reality was one of the top things discussed on the online message boards he’s been to this year.

The tech world, however, has been down a similar path before. Just a few years ago, manufacturers lined store shelves with 3-D TVs capable of projecting stereoscopic images into your living room — and on those shelves the sets stayed.

Among the reasons 3-D TV flopped: you had to wear uncomfortable glasses, and the experience made some people dizzy. Perhaps most important, there just wasn’t much in the way of good stuff to watch.

Virtual reality requires people to wear large headsets that block the real world, and immersive video has made some viewers nauseous (although its purveyors claim to have fixed that).

It’s not exactly a friends-and-family experience, either. If you chafe when your companions are glued to their phones at dinner, you’ll want to watch your blood pressure when they start wearing VR headsets in the living room, tuning out other people along with reality.

Another hurdle: VR’s initial apps are heavily weighted toward games.

Sure, one immersive video puts you on stage with Cirque du Soleil performers as they reach for dazzling heights; another lands you on the set of the horror satire “Scream Queens.” But while they’re fun to watch, many clips come off more as demos or promos than compelling entertainment in their own right.

Jason Tsai, TrendForce’s wearable devices analyst, told the AP that companies are reluctant to invest in non-gaming VR media until they’re sure there’s a real market for it. And that’s a big part of virtual reality’s chicken-and-egg challenge.

The new systems represent “science fiction coming to reality,” said Gary Shapiro, head of the group that runs the annual CES gadget show, which gets underway in Las Vegas this week. VR and related technologies will be showcased there.

What’s changed?

Screen and graphics technologies have finally gotten good enough to provide a realistic and responsive VR experience.

Many leading companies are betting on VR. Google, for instance, offers a low-rent, though still effective, virtual-reality system it calls Cardboard — literally a folded-cardboard contraption that holds lenses and a smartphone for playing VR apps.

The Samsung headset is a step above that; it also uses a phone to play video, but includes its own motion sensors to better track the movement of your head.

VR’s immediate challenge is simply getting people to try VR so they realize it can be much more than games. Bonnie To, a Los Angeles accountant, watched a few minutes of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony in VR during a lunch-break demo. She said the ability to look around the concert hall was “really cool” and thought the sound and picture quality was good.

But curiosity won’t necessarily translate to sales.

VR makers are working with media companies to expand options for non- gamers, much the way radio maker RCA started the NBC network nearly a century ago to fill the airwaves.

Eventually, they figure the new technology will produce new storytelling forms — for instance, choose-your-own-adventure narratives that viewers can influence through their actions. But that’s some time off.

For now, the hope is early owners will show and tell less tech-savvy friends about the potential of VR — essentially becoming “a virtual sales force,” said Richard Marks, who heads Sony PlayStation’s research arm, Magic Labs.

Video games have grown so much they’re no longer a niche market, said Diffusion Group analyst Joel Espelien, who argues that younger players will likely embrace VR. As they get older, subsequent generations may follow.

“It’s a decade-long story,” he said. “Things don’t happen overnight when you’re talking about a pretty significant new behavior.”

Even if virtual reality takes off, Pierce said he doesn’t expect it to take over. People will still play video games on their televisions, handhelds and computer monitors he said. And plenty of genres of games — from 2-D platformers such as Super Mario Bros. to top-down strategy games like “Civilization” and card games like “Hearthstone” — that don’t lend themselves easily to virtual reality.

“This generation (of virtual reality) may be the one that goes the furthest, but I don’t think it’ll completely take over,” he said.

But the potential is exciting nonetheless, Pierce said.

“Just because it adds that extra dimension, the idea that you can have this interactive world you can visit that is completely 3-D and it surrounds you and encompasses you,” he said. “It’s the next level of taking you to that world and making you apart of that world.”