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personnel using a VR parachute trainer]] BACKGROUND Terminology The origin of the term "virtual reality" is uncertain though it has been credited to '' The Judas Mandala '', a 1982 novel by Damien Broderick where the context of use is somewhat different from that defined above. A related term coined by Myron Krueger , " Artificial Reality ", has been in use since the 1970s . The concept of virtual reality was popularized in mass media by movies as '' The Lawnmower Man '' (and others mentioned below), and the VR research boom of the 1990s was motivated in part by the non-fiction book ''Virtual Reality'' by Howard Rheingold . The book served to demystify the heretofore niche area, making it more accessible to less technical researchers and enthusiasts, with an impact similar to what his book '' The Virtual Community '' had on Virtual Community research lines closely related to VR. While virtual reality originally denoted a fully immersive tethered system, the term has since been used to describe systems lacking wired gloves etc., such as those driven by VRML and X3D on the World Wide Web and occasionally even text-based interactive systems such as MOO s or MUD s. Non-immersive virtual reality uses a normal monitor, and the person manipulates the virtual environment using a keyboard, a mouse, a joystick or a similar input device. The term was used in the early 1990s to denote 3D Computer And Video Games , particularly First-person Shooter s. VR Timeline the term "virtual reality" was popularized by Jaron Lanier , one of the modern pioneers of the field. Lanier had founded the company VPL Research (from "Virtual Programming Languages") in 1985 , which developed and built some of the seminal "goggles n' gloves" systems of that decade. IMPACT There has been increasing interest in the potential social impact of new technologies, such as virtual reality (as may be seen in utopian literature, within the social sciences, and in popular culture). Perhaps most notably, Mychilo Stephenson Cline , in his book, ''Power, Madness, and Immortality: The Future of Virtual Reality'', argues that virtual reality will lead to a number of important changes in human life and activity. He argues that:
Public Perception The general public’s fascination and expectations of the Virtual Reality field and applications have been greatly influenced by the coverage it has received in the Mass Media (see Mass Media section below). The high expectations raised from the coverage, and from movies such as '' The Lawnmower Man '' have led to disappointment and ambivalence concerning VR and its value to the individual. VR’s success in the entertainment marketplace has been uneven at best, in part driven by disappointment with the reality of virtual reality versus the mass media notions and because the cost still after decades is nearly prohibitive for Immersive equipment owners, forcing them to pass the cost onto the users of the equipment—and the experience using contemporary VR equipment still has not demonstrated it is superior to satisfaction gained from other entertainment alternatives of similar or lesser cost. To date, the exceptions in the public sector have been Theme Parks and similar venues and Video Gaming (with a population willing to engage with the imaginary environments on the developers' terms). However, the public seems more than willing to embrace VR as a common media, provided the experience provided matches up to tremendously high expectations created by illusions of what VR could be provided by movies and television alongside actual news coverage. For the technology to work well enough to support a business model, it must break through the "novelty barrier" with a Killer Application to commoditize the industry. With the goal of ideal Simulated Reality itself possibly unattainable, Virtual Reality technologies have found their best success in industry where they line up with pre-existing business needs. To be able to mock up the physical world with relatively high fidelity is difficult but technically feasible, to be able to mock up a person’s perception/imagination to the same level is a task far more complex. Mass Media Mass media has been a great advocate and perhaps a great hindrance to its development over the years. During the research “boom” of the late 1980s into the 1990s the news media’s prognostication on the potential of VR--and potential overexposure in publishing the predictions of anyone who had one (whether or not that person had a true perspective on the technology and its limits) --built up the expectations of the technology so high as to be impossible to achieve under the technology then or any technology to date. Entertainment media reinforced these concepts with furturistic imagery many generations beyond contemporary capabilities. Fiction Books Many Science Fiction books and movies have imagined characters being "trapped in virtual reality". The first modern work to use this idea was Daniel F. Galouye 's novel Simulacron-3 , which was made into a German teleplay titled ''Welt am Draht'' ("World on a Wire"). Other science fiction books have promoted the idea of virtual reality as a partial, but not total, substitution for the misery of reality (in the sense that a Pauper in the real world can be a prince in VR), or have touted it as a method for creating breathtaking virtual worlds in which from Earth's now toxic atmosphere. They are not aware of this, because their minds exist within a shared, idealized virtual world known as Dream Earth, where they grow up, live, and die, never knowing the world they live in is but a dream. An early short science fiction story - "The Veldt" - about an all too real 'virtual reality" was included in the 1951 book The Illustrated Man , by Ray Bradbury and may be the first fictional work to fully describe the concept. Television Perhaps the earliest example of virtual reality on television is a Doctor Who serial The Deadly Assassin . This story, first broadcast in 1976, introduced a dream-like computer-generated reality known as the Matrix (no relation to the film — see below). The first major television series to showcase virtual reality was . They featured the Holodeck , a virtual reality facility, generally on star ships and star bases, that enabled its users to recreate and experience anything they wanted. One difference from current virtual reality technology, however, was that Replicators and Transporters were used to actually create and place objects in the holodeck, rather than relying solely on the illusion of physical objects, as is done today. Motion Pictures Steven Lisberger's film ''''. The popular classic of The Matrix is about the world of the future, where most of the human species is kept docile by a race of sentient machines (which humankind created) in a "Virtual Reality" Computer Program called The Matrix . The machines use their human population as energy generators feeding off them as their brains act out their lives completely oblivious of the real world while inside the Matrix. Games In the Role-playing Game , the mage tradition of the Virtual Adepts is presented as the real creators of VR. The Adepts' ultimate objective is to move into virtual reality, scrapping their physical bodies in favour of improved virtual ones. Also, the .hack series centers on a virtual reality video game. Marketing A side effect of the chic image that has been cultivated for Virtual Reality in the media is that advertising and merchandise have been associated with VR over the years to take advantage of the buzz. This is often seen in product tie-ins with cross-media properties, especially gaming licenses, with varying degrees of success. The NES Power Glove from the 1980s was an early example. Marketing ties between VR and video games are not to be unexpected, given that much of the progress in 3D computer graphics and virtual environment development (traditional hallmarks of VR) has been driven by the gaming industry over the last decade. CHALLENGES Virtual reality has been heavily criticized for being an inefficient method for navigating non-geographical information. At present, the idea of Ubiquitous Computing is very popular in User Interface design, and this may be seen as a reaction against VR and its problems. In reality, these two kinds of interfaces have totally different goals and are complementary. The goal of ubiquitous computing is to bring the computer into the user's world, rather than force the user to go inside the computer. The current trend in VR is actually to merge the two user interfaces to create a fully immersive and integrated experience. See Simulated Reality for a discussion of what might have to be considered if a flawless virtual reality technology was possible. PIONEERS AND NOTABLES SEE ALSO REFERENCES AND NOTES
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