A Virtual Reality Timeline
… which will never be quite complete, but which offers a general guide of how VR and virtual environments have evolved both as technology and as concept.
| When | Who | Where | What |
| pre-history | humankind | Altamira, Lascaux, Vallon-Pont-d’Arc, etc | cave paintings; storytelling; ritual dance, other ritual paraphernalia |
| always | children | everywhere | imaginative (immersive) play |
| now | humankind | almost everywhere | “a willing suspension of disbelief”: theatre, television, arcade games |
| 13th Cent. | Giotto di Bondone (1267-1337) | Italy | (3D) perspective in art |
| 1833 | Sir Charles Wheatstone |
England | the stereoscope; improved by Sir David Brewster, 1844 |
| 1838 | The Stereopticon | ||
| 1928 – 1939 | Edwin Land | develops Polaroid glasses (1928). Shows first experimental stereoscopic (3D) film (1935). First stereo feature film produced for Chrysler Coroporation’s exhibit at New York World Fair, 1939 | |
| 1929 | The Link Trainer (flight simulator) |
USA | Link patents original design for flight simulator. Later used for pilot training during WWII |
| 1930 | Herman Ives | ??? | lenticular lenses; ‘multiplexed’ 3D images capitalising on binocular parallax for the illusion of depth |
| 1952 | The Cinerama Projection System | ||
| 1958 | Philco Television head-mounted display (HMD) | ||
| 1960, 1962 | Morton Heilig | New York | The ‘Stereoscopic Television Apparatus for Individual Use’ ‚Äî a head-mounted stereophonic TV display (1960); and the ‘Sensorama Simulator’ (1962) |
| Douglas Engelbart | |||
| 1965 | Ivan Sutherland | IFIP Congress | Presents a paper ‘The Ultimate Display’, at a conference of the International Federation of Information Processing Societies,.setting forth explicit programme for the development of computer graphics and the design of virtual worlds |
| 1966 | 2D molecular modeller developed by Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). | ||
| 1966+ | Ivan Sutherland | MIT (1966); University of Utah (1966+) | invents HMD (1966); first fully functional HMD with first virtual world software, January 1st, 1970 |
| 1968 | Computer Graphics and HMDs first used for flight simulators. | ||
| from late 1960s to present | Frederick Brooks, Henry Fuchs, Stephen Pizer, Warren Robinett | Dept. of Computer Science, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill | scientific visualisation; pharmaceutical chemistry (molcular modeling) and medical imaging; ARM (Argonne remote manipulator) with force feedback; ‘architectural walkthrough’ of Sitterson Hall |
| 1970 | Frederick Brooks and graduate students | Dept. of Computer Science, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill | works starts on combining force-reflection feedback with interactive computer graphics; ARMs obtained from Argonne National Laboratories |
| 1978+ | Association pour la Création et la Recherche sur les Outils d’Expression (ACROE) | LIFIA, Grenoble | force-feedback devices (‘virtual violin’) for sound synthesis; transmission of gesture as a means for linking human eye-hand skills and imagination with computerised rendering tools |
| 1983(?) | Brenda Laurel, Scott Fisher, Michael Naimark, Jaron Lanier, Eric Hulteen, Susan Brennan, Thomas Zimmerman | Atari Research Laboratory, Sunnyvale, California. | Interactive 3D games |
| 1984 | William Gibson | [n/a] | the novel Neuromancer introduces the notion of ‘cyberspace’ and the Matrix |
| 1985-1990 | Scott Fisher, Warren Robinett | NASA/Ames Aerospace Human Factors Research Division | First use of combined Dataglove (from VPL) and HMD in the Virtual Environment Display (VIVED) system. 3D sound added. Evolves into Virtual Interface Environment Workstation (VIEW); voice commands and speech recognition. Scott Fisher leaves NASA to co-found Telepresence Research with Brenda Laurel, 1990. |
| 198?+ | Jaron Lanier, Thomas Zimmerman | VPL Research Inc, Palo Alto, California | Lanier and Zimmerman co-found VPL Research Inc. Evolution of Lanier’s “visual programming language” Mandala / Grasp / Embrace. Zimmerman’s optical-flex-sensing glove (‘DataGlove’). Ann Lasco-Harvill joins VPL, 1987, to work on development of first DataSuit. First off-the-shelf vendor of VR systems from 1988. |
| 1986 | Advanced Telecommunications Research |
Kansai Science City, Kyoto |
ATR established. Multimillion dollar multidisciplinary project to enable telecollaboration in virtual spaces, without the use of HMDs, gloves or body suit, through the construction of surrounding ‘virtual rooms’ |
| 1987 | VPL, AGE, Mattel | VPL Research Inc, Palo Alto, California | development of the $100 PowerGlove for the video games market. |
| 1988 | John Walker | Autodesk | Sept 1988: John Walker’s “Through the Looking Glass: Beyond User Interfaces” paper launches Autodesk’s “Cyberpunk Initiative”. |
| 1989 | Autodesk / VPL | California | Autodesk and VPL (DataGlove, head-tracker) begin commercial development of VR |
| 1989 | VPL & Autodesk | San Francisco (VPL); Anaheim (Autodesk) | ‘Virtual Reality Day’, June 7th, 1989. VPL demonstrate their RB2 (‘reality built for two’) system at TEXPO in San Francisco Civic Auditorium; Autodesk’s “Weird Science” cyberspace demo at Anaheim. |
| ??? | Thomas Furness | Human Interface Technology Laboratory (Seattle) | project to overcome HMD problem of peripheral vision by inscribing images directly to the retina |
| 1990 | HITL | Human Interface Technology Laboratory (Seattle) | HITL creates a virtual Seattle. |
| 1990 | ??? | University of Texas, Dept of Architecture | First Conference on Cyberspace (May 1990) |
| 1991 | VPL, UNC, Human Interface Technology Lab, Media Lab |
[various] | “Reality Net” ‚Äî RB2-based (?) |
| 1992 | Neal Stephenson | [n/a] | publishes Snow Crash |
| 199? | BICC | ? | Virtuosi(?) – telecollaboration through virtual presence |
| 199? | Margaret Minsky | ‘The Snake Pit’, MIT Media Lab | modeling haptic perception |
| 1993 | Autodesk | USA | Autodesk launches Cyberspace Developers Kit |
| 1993 | Division | UK | Division (founded 1989) goes public and first UK VR initiative set up. |
| 1993 | John Carmack, John Romero, Adrian Carmack | id Software, Dallas | Doom released; Quake released 1996 |
| mid 1990s | Mars exploration robots controlled from Earth through VR. | ||
| 1996 | |||
| 2010 | “By 2010, that first room of Sutherland’s will have multiplied itself into a virtual cosmos. It is impossible to say, in today’s terms, how vast that future cyberworld will be.” (Howard Rheingold, 1991 Virtual Reality) |
