VR's Long, Weird History the People Behind a ’50S VR Progenitor, Atari’S ’80S Think Tank and Other Surprising Milestones Along the Way
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COVER STORY VR's long, weird history The people behind a ’50s VR progenitor, Atari’s ’80s think tank and other surprising milestones along the way. By Brian Crecente @crecenteb Oct 26, 2016, 12:00pm EDT am in a Gitmo interrogation room, panting like a dog, squatting in a torturous position, muscles screaming. I am floating through a I shadow world, transparent trees rooted in the shifting space around me, glowworms of light slipping past my view. I am in a cage lying low — past corals, past light — and around it the deep darkness of the ocean comes to greet me. Time, place, even a sense of self can lose meaning in these creations weaved from PROCESS the gossamer threads of fact found in Exploring the wide, wild world fiction, the illusional fancies of magic of virtual reality and its more realism, the mind-expanding nature of than 50-year history is no easy synthetic hallucination. task. But unlike the evanescent nature of In setting about telling this story, dreams, worlds made in virtual reality I started with an analytical stick around. They await your return; approach. My hope was to create they know you are there and control all a list of meaningful people whose that you see and hear. work greatly impacted virtual reality’s history, growth and Today, just about anyone can, as Timothy continued chances of Leary once urged, "turn on, boot up, jack mainstream success. in." Virtual reality machines start at less than $100 and are powered by phones, Initially, I dug through the computers and game consoles. patents of current known works, tracing back who created those But that wasn’t always the case. innovations and the people they worked with. I traced the lives of The long, slow evolution of virtual those early and modern reality was marked by fits and starts, by innovators. I created a family staggering success and abysmal failure. It tree of sorts to connect pupil to was a journey of secretive labs, bold teacher, employee to employer, experiments, game consoles and robot researcher to think tank. dogs. Its conceivers came from all schools of thought. They were writers, Then I set about finding contacts actors, philosophers, mathematicians, for this relatively short list, musicians, tinkerers and scientists. emailing each to ask who they thought were the most Some were drawn to the budding influential people in VR history. technology through a desire to improve movie theaters; others saw its innate That got to a list of about 40 ability to help treat the afflicted. It was people. I then turned that list to some the ultimate display, to others into an online poll and sent it to a the perfect medium for expression, or a collection of well-respected tech tool for astronauts, or a way to be in two sites that often write about places at once, or a game engine, or a virtual reality. Both Road to VR mind expander. and UploadVR responded and participated. The poll asked one Over the course of more than 50 years, person from each site to score the innovators of virtual reality plugged each of the innovators by their away at this machinery of the impact on the technology. It also imagination, adapting, adopting, asked for a list of anyone I might evolving, pushing forward. have missed. There is a direct line that can be drawn That left me with about 50 from Mort Heilig’s 1958 Sensorama to names. Palmer Luckey’s 2016 Oculus Rift. It’s a line that passes through four eras of I then emailed all of those I virtual reality, that swims through the could track down from the list think tanks of MIT, Atari, NASA and the and asked them to rank each University of Southern California. It is person by the impact they had on through this baton pass of knowledge virtual reality. About 20 people from mentor to student, seen over and responded and filled out the poll. over again across decades of research, I then took that final poll result, that virtual reality finally got a name, averaged it with the results of the finally came into its own and inevitably websites, and used it to narrow found a marketplace among gamers, the names down to the 25 people gadget owners and, perhaps one day, you see here. everyone else. This story lightly touches on the deep history of virtual reality and the many people who helped shape it over time. It includes 25 of the top innovators in the field dating back to Mort Heilig, considered by many to be the father of the technology. While this is by no means meant to be an all-encompassing examination of the people who impacted virtual reality’s development, it offers a snapshot of the sheer variety and creativity of some of those luminaries of virtual science and art. 1958 // SENSORAMA Mort Heilig Imagine it’s 1964 and you stroll into a penny arcade near Times Square. The jangle of mechanical entertainment almost overcomes you. You might see duck hunting games with guns resting on steel arms, a few pinball machines like Riverboat, perhaps a Big Champ boxing game. Right next to the door to the arcade, you're confronted by a massive contraption. It looks like a big vending machine for sodas or cigarettes, but there's a chair mounted in front of it and a way to slide the seat up to a viewing area. The word "Sensorama" slowly spins above the machine. It takes just a quarter to bring the machine to life. Soon, you're cycling your way through Brooklyn, the chair beneath you rumbling over the road, wind from a fan blowing in your face. A wide screen shows the view of the city from the front of the bike in full color, and occasionally you can even smell what it’s like to be there. "He started building the prototype in 1958," Marianne Heilig says. "In 1960 he had the machine almost done and by 1964 he had it fully functioning. He had already shown it to the press and there were articles about it." A person could choose from four movies in the machine, including a ride through Brooklyn and a close-up performance by a belly dancer. Despite the potential for the Sensorama, the best that Heilig could do was arrange for it to sit along arcade machines in theme parks or, for a time, in a penny arcade in New York City. "It saw some theoretical success, but it was viewed at most as a curiosity." READ MORE ABOUT HEILIG IVAN SUTHERLAND 1966 // SWORD OF DAMOCLES As Mort Heilig toiled away in virtual obscurity, working to find funding for the commercialization of his virtual reality machine, Ivan Sutherland was working on his bachelor’s degree in electrical engineering at Carnegie Institute of Technology. Then he moved on to his master’s from Caltech and finally, his PhD from MIT. While Sutherland would eventually go on to have such a deep impact on computer graphics that he would become known as the father of that field, in 1966 he created the first working virtual reality head-mounted display. His work on what he called the Ultimate Display started in 1965, when he published a paper on the topic that imagined a room within which a computer could control the existence of matter. "A chair displayed in such a room would be good enough to sit in," he wrote. "Handcuffs displayed in such a room would be confining, and a bullet displayed in such a room would be fatal. With appropriate programming such a display could literally be the Wonderland into which Alice walked." With the help of student Bob Sproull, Sutherland began integrating a variety of devices into a single head-mounted display. The end result used a stereoscopic display and a complicated mechanical head-tracking system that allowed users to change their point of view inside wireframe rooms. To track movement and help alleviate the weight of the headset, the entire thing was attached to a mechanical arm suspended from the lab's ceiling. The somewhat dangerous-looking device had to be strapped to a user’s head, earning it the nickname "The Sword of Damocles." MYRON KRUEGER 1975 // VIDEOPLACE As Todd Richmond, director of USC’s Mixed Reality Lab, puts it, artists have a way of cutting through the BS. They don’t have to worry about selling something or making it profitable. Among the early innovators exploring the noncommercial and nonscientific uses of virtual reality was Myron Krueger. As with many of the early innovators, it’s hard to place a single label on Krueger. After earning a PhD in computer science, he went on to explore the notion of interactions within art and with art, chiefly powered by computers and often in the context of augmented or virtual reality. Most influential among his work is likely Videoplace, which evolved over time starting in 1975. The first iteration of Videoplace was computer-free and had two people interacting through a video screen and projected images. The current version includes 25 different programs and is more of a virtual and artificial reality lab. This early work had a deep impact on both virtual reality and the room-sized virtual reality technology that came to be known as CAVEs. ERIC HOWLETT 1978 // LEEP MIT graduate, inventor and perpetual tinkerer Eric Howlett spent nearly 30 years after college in a number of wildly different jobs, from researcher to engineer to marketing manager to optics consultant.