HISTORY OF VIRTUAL REALITY

• Sensorama – in years 1960-1962 Morton Heilig created a multi-sensory simulator. A prerecorded film in color and stereo, was augmented by binaural sound, scent, wind and vibration experiences. This was the first approach to create a virtual reality system and it had all the features of such an environment, but it was not interactive.

• The Ultimate Display – in 1965 Ivan Sutherland proposed the ultimate solution of virtual reality: an artificial world construction concept that included interactive graphics, force-feedback, sound, smell and taste.

• The Sword of Damocles– the first virtual reality system realized in hardware, not in concept. Ivan Sutherland constructs a device considered as the first Head Mounted Display (HMD), with appropriate head tracking. It supported a stereo view that was updated correctly according to the user’s head position and orientation.

• GROPE – the first prototype of a force-feedback system realized at the University of North Carolina (UNC) in 1971.

• VIDEOPLACE – Artificial Reality created in 1975 by Myron Krueger – “a conceptual environment, with no existence”. In this system the silhouettes of the users grabbed by the cameras were projected on a large screen. The participants were able to interact one with the other thanks to the image processing techniques that determined their positions in 2D screen’s space.

• VCASS – Thomas Furness at the US Air Force’s Armstrong Medical Research Laboratories developed in 1982 the Visually Coupled Airborne Systems Simulator – an advanced flight simulator. The fighter pilot wore a HMD that augmented the out-thewindow view by the graphics describing targeting or optimal flight path information.

• VIVED – VIrtual Visual Environment Display – constructed at the NASA Ames in 1984 with off-the-shelf technology a stereoscopic monochrome HMD.

• VPL – the VPL company manufactures the popular DataGlove (1985) and the Eyephone

• BOOM – commercialized in 1989 by the Fake Space Labs. BOOM is a small box containing two CRT monitors that can be viewed through the eye holes. The user can grab the box, keep it by the eyes and move through the virtual world, as the mechanical arm measures the position and orientation of the box.

• UNC Walkthrough project – in the second half of 1980s at the University of North Carolina an architectural walkthrough application was developed. Several VR devices were constructed to improve the quality of this system like: HMDs, optical trackers and the Pixel-Plane graphics engine.

• Virtual Wind Tunnel – developed in early 1990s at the NASA Ames application that allowed the observation and investigation of flow-fields with the help of BOOM and DataGlove.

• CAVE – presented in 1992 CAVE (CAVE Automatic Virtual Environment) is a virtual reality and scientific visualization system. Instead of using a HMD it projects stereoscopic images on the walls of room (user must wear LCD shutter glasses). This approach assures superior quality and resolution of viewed images, and wider field of view in comparison to HMD based systems.

• Augmented Reality (AR) – a technology that “presents a virtual world that enriches, rather than replaces the real world” [Brys92c]. This is achieved by means of see-through HMD that superimposes virtual three-dimensional objects on real ones. This technology was previously used to enrich fighter pilot’s view with additional flight information (VCASS). Thanks to its great potential – the enhancement of human vision – augmented reality became a focus of many research projects in early 1990s.