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NEWTON Home Page NEWTON Teachers Visit Our Archives Ask A Question How To Ask A Question Question of the Week Our Expert Scientists Volunteer at NEWTON! Frequently Asked Questions Referencing NEWTON About NEWTON About Ask A Scientist Education At Argonne Inventor of virtual reality 
Name: Dutch
Status: N/A
Age: N/A
Location: N/A
Country: N/A
Date: Around 1995
Question:
Who invented virtual reality and when?


Replies:
VR is one of those things that slowly evolved and was not really 'invented' by any one person or group. One of the first people to recognize, think about, and publish something on VR was Morton Heilig back in the 1950s (see chapter 2 in _Virtual Reality_ by Howard Rheingold, 1991): "Heilig started to think about what would have to be accomplished to create an artificial experience that could fool people into believing that they were actually occupying and experiencing a movie set. "How do I know I am in a particular environment?" Heilig asked himself in 1954." From chapter 5: "VR as we know it today did not flower directly from the work of Heilig or Krueger, but from an intersection of computer science, stereoscopy, and simulation, in academic, military, and commercial research laboratories."

Hawley

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