Interesting Fact
In October of 1958, what is widely considered to be the world’s first video game, was created by physicist William Higinbotham. It was extremely simple, a tennis-like game, with just a small ball being bounced back and forth from each side of the screen. Now, a little more than sixty years later, there are now realistic three-dimensional immersive and interactive simulations in the form of virtual reality, or “VR” for short.
History and Beginnings
Artists, entertainers, and people in general have always been looking for ways to enhance their viewing experiences and creating out-of-world settings. This led to the development and use of early forms of VR with panoramas, 3-D effects in cinema, and “Vitarama” (Lowood, 2021). Fred Waller Vitarama in 1939 had the goal of duplicating the entire human field of vision. To generate the illusion of immersion in the space perceived by a viewer, the Vitarama approach utilized many cameras and projectors as well as an arc-shaped screen. Even though the term “virtual reality” wasn’t coined until 1987 by Jaron Lanier, this was VR in its earliest of form and was even used in military training, something that it is still used for today (Lowood, 2021). VR has come a long way since then, being the latest groundbreaking technology that can be applied in just about anything.