Game Development Reference
In-Depth Information
Virtual Worlds Timeline
Sources include:
Bruce Damer's Virtual Worlds Timeline, the
origins and evolution of virtual social worlds
http://www.vwtimeline.org
Wikipedia, Virtual worlds,
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virtual_worlds
Plato's “Allegory of the Cave,” discusses the
relationship of Philosophy, perception and
understanding of the perceived world
AD23 - AD79
Pliny the Elder wrote about
illusion and human perception
500BC - 1000AD
Giambattista
della Porta,
CameraObscura/
Pepper's Ghost
1580
1000 - 1500
“All that we see or seem is but a dream
within a dream.”
Edgar Allan Poe
1500 - 1900
Laterna Magica
1671
Étienne-Gaspard Robert (Robertson) “Phantasmagoria”
1799
1894
Edison's Kinetoscope
1895
Lumiere Brothers Cinema
“Reality is merely an illusion, albeit a
very persistent one.”
Albert Einstein
1900 - 1950
1940s
Admiral Luis de Florez pioneered
the use of flight simulators.
1962
Space War! and Sensorama (Heilig)
1968
Ivan Sutherland and Bob Sproull create first VR Head Mounted Display (HMD)
1974
Maze War
1978
1st MUD
1950 - 199
1990
1983
Krueger's Video Place was the first graphics and gesture recognition environment
1986
Habitat - Lucasfilm Games, Quantum Link and Fujitsu
1987
“Star Trek: The Next Generation” introduced the Holodeck
1989
Tiny MUD
“Virtual Reality developed from fic
on in 1984 to a rich
discourse and a marketed technology by 1992.”
Chesher
1992
CAVE Automatic Virtual Environment (CAVE)
invented at the University of Illinois at
Chicago's Electronic Visualization Laboratory
1990
-
1
995
9
1993
Doom
1995
Worlds Chat, Alphaworld, Active Worlds, WorldsAway, Onlive Traveler,
The Palace Blaxxun, and other online social, constructive virtual worlds
1995 - 2000
1999
Everquest MMORPG
2001
Runescape
2000 - 2005
2003
Star Wars Galaxies
Second Life, Toontown, and There
2003
World of Warcraft
2004
MTV Virtual Laguna Beach
2006
2005 - 2010
Multiverse, and Kaneva
2007
OpenSim, and Twinity
2008
“We all live every day in virtual environments,
defined by our ideas.”
Michael Crichton
Kinect
2010
2010 -
Oculus Rift HMD
2012
FIGURE 1.1
This timeline shows some of the key ideas, devices, companies, games and projects that have contributed
to the development of virtual environments as we know them today.
