Until fairly recently, the dream of donning a headset and dropping into a virtual world belonged purely in the realms of science fiction, like Star Trek‘s Holodeck or The Lawnmower Man. Thanks to the work of companies like Oculus, HTC, and others, that’s no longer the case. But virtual reality’s history goes back a whole lot further than that — so without further ado, here are our picks for eight of the major landmarks in tech history that made the VR dream a virtual reality.
SENSORAMA (1957)
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When you think about Hollywood movies in the 1950s, there’s a good chance that one of the first things that come to mind are the gimmicks. Modern widescreen, 3D stereoscopic movies, and even the ill-fated Smell-O-Vision arrived over a 10-year stretch of time. Filmmaker Morton Heilig took things even further, however.
In 1957, he invented a large booth-like machine called the Sensorama, which was intended to combine multiple technologies to give one to four people the illusion of being in a fully 3D immersive world — complete with smell, stereo sound, vibrations, and even atmospheric effects like wind in the hair. A few years later, in 1960, he honed a version of this idea into a patent for the world’s first head-mounted display, promising stereoscopic 3D images, wide vision, and true stereo sound.
Neither technology ever materialized in his lifetime, but they both helped lay the groundwork for the VR revolution to come.
THE SWORD OF DAMOCLES (1968)
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Developed by MIT in 1978, with a helping hand from DARPA, the Aspen Movie Map was basically a virtual reality take on Google Street View. Instead of the basic 3D graphics that could be created at the time, it used photographs taken from a car driving through Aspen, Colorado, giving the user an interactive first-person journey around the city.
Running it required several Laserdisc players, a computer, and a touch screen display. While there was no HMD component to the project, the Aspen Movie Map’s innovative use of first-person interactivity nevertheless represented a smart examination of how VR could be used to transport people to other places.
MAKING A NAME FOR ITSELF (19??)
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In the 1970s, computer artist Myron Krueger coined the term “artificial reality,” while most people consider the popularization of the term VR as we now know it to be due to computer scientist and artist Jaron Lanier in the 1980s.
SEGA VR (1991)
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In 2010, 18-year-old entrepreneur Palmer Luckey created the first prototype of the Oculus Rift. Boasting a 90-degree field of view that hadn’t been seen previously in a consumer device, it raised $2.4 million on Kickstarter a couple years later, before the company was purchased by Facebook for $2 billion in 2014.
Luckey’s decision to sell the company before shipping any prototypes to Kickstarter backers stirred up controversy from early supporters.
HITTING THE MAINSTREAM (2017)
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Here in 2017, hundreds of companies are working on their own VR headsets. These include market leaders such as HTC (makers of the HTC Vive), but also Google (with its enormously popular Google Cardboard), Apple, Amazon, Sony, Samsung, and others.
With plenty of marketplace competition, the addition of various innovative controllers for allowing interaction with the virtual world, and a wide range of intriguing use-cases for the technology, it seems that virtual reality’s time may finally have come at last.
Source: Digital Trends