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or represented by artifi cial means and in which all imagery is displayed
from the point of view of an individual participant, even as he or she
moves around. The effect is to give an interactor the sense of being pres-
ent in a place where their body is not currently located. In the early 1990s,
the typical interface technology involved a head-mounted display to pro-
duce stereoscopic video, some means of tracking the participant's head and
body (in order to generate viewpoint-dependent images correctly and to
determine direction of gaze and movement), a means of tracking manual
gestures (typically an instrumented glove), and a means of representing a
three-dimensional audio environment (typically achieved with spatialized
sound presented through headphones).
VR is utterly a fi rst-person point-of-view medium. The notion of point
of view in VR is the manifestation of one's relationship to the representa-
tional world. Somehow in the world of computing as well as in fi lm, the
“screen” has become utterly conventional. VR shows no prejudice in its
challenging of conventions; it questions fi lm as rigorously as interactive
computing. If one is to get the feel of a place, one must walk around it,
listen to it, pick things up, and feel the presence of other beings with all
the senses.
In 1990, when I was fi nishing up the fi rst edition of this topic, the
VR phenomenon was approaching the elbow in its pop-culture curve. It
was about to become one of those terms like “turbo” that was rendered
meaningless by overuse—the term “virtual reality” had begun to spread
like an oil slick over anything new and sexy in the world of interactive
entertainment (e.g., “desktop VR”). By the end of 1991, movie producers,
cable TV executives, and theme-park entrepreneurs had started talking
about “passive VR” (an oxymoron if there ever was one). Meanwhile, hip
young Northern Californians, initially at the forefront of VR enthusiasm,
began to make dark jokes about “face-sucking goggles.” As the fi rst main-
stream books, movies, and TV shows picked up on the hype, the younger
and more creative contributors to the VR community began quietly mutat-
ing. In late 1992, VPL Research—pioneers in the development of enabling
VR technology and wellspring of the pop-culture phenomenon—effectively
ceased operation.
As the VR meme started to fl ame out in Northern California, many of
us began scrambling to change the words on our shingles from “virtual
reality” to something roughly synonymous, but less tainted—telepresence,
augmented reality, immersion technology. Anything to get some distance
from the all-too-vivid spectacle of the hype-fueled VR road-and-media
