86 Years of Virtual Reality
A deeper look into Virtual Reality History and its Milestones.
There are various online resources that deal with Virtual Reality and its history. What I would like to do in this post is give some order and explanation to the typical timelines of VR milestones and actors.
As for many technologies, here too there may be many cases of less successful but not less notable attempts to get to what we call Virtual Reality. Let’s just stick to the main milestones here for synthesis.
First let’s define a little better what we call VR. As a person working in the field, I would first simply define VR as an interactive, immersive 3D environment. Like any other synthetic environment, it needs to be developed on a set of rules, interactions, exchange of data.
To better explain how a VR environment is made, let me define some elements:
A VR environment needs to be developed on a platform or engine, which serves for the environment elements to be assembled and work together. A 3D interaction engine is a software that allows interactions to happen in a 3D environment. It regulates how physics works, gravity, force, light and sounds.
So, to build a VR environment, we need to start from an engine or platform.
The other elements that will make up our environment, are the following: 3D models of spaces and objects, animation scripts, interaction scripts and a other pieces of code that make object and interactions work. Yes, we can have Avatars too of course, but to make a VR environment, it is not necessary to have an Avatar, as it is necessary to have the above mentioned elements.
Once you have an engine and all the elements, you can assemble and publish your VR environment. Then you need to be able to access it and give access to it. Before thinking of an Avatar, you need to think of a device. In order to access a VR environment you need a device and a viewer. By device I mean a computer, tablet or phone. By viewer I mean a 3D browser or a web browser plug-in.
So to recap…
- Platform and engine.
- 3D models, scripts, animations, sounds, images and so on.
- Device.
- Viewer.
These are the fundamental building blocks of a virtual reality experience. After them, we can add the vast ecosystem of VR smart devices that are currently entering the market, such as Oculus, Samsung VR Gear, Hydra, and many more. All of these will make your VR experience more immersive and engaging.
What I have talked about so far is only for single user VR environments. If we want to build a multi-user VR environment, then we need to add a Network, to the above points. A network can be a local area network or the Internet itself, any network that allows users to connect from different places and devices.
At this point, we can have an online connected virtual environment, to host multiple users at the same time. This way we can experience a shared VR immersion and new forms of collaboration and interactions. This brings us to the concept of the Metaverse. What happens when we connect online different VR environments and turn them into what we could define a 3D web domains and sites?
The answer is, we are adding a third dimension to the Internet to create a shared and connect virtual reality ecosystem, made of different worlds and VR experiences. This is what we call the Metaverse. By adding just one additional building block, the Internet, we have made a single VR environment, a part of a vast ecosystem of VR sites, similar to what the Internet is now, but with one additional dimension.
Why all of this to introduce a post on the history of VR?
Because in order to draw a precise timeline of VR in history, we need to define very well what we consider to be VR. Under this perspective, before making a list of milestones, we can define a set of different types of milestones in VR, each made of different elements.
- Type 1: VR Platforms & Engines
- Type 2: VR Devices
- Type 3: VR single user environments
- Type 4: VR multiuser environments
- Type 5: Metaverse platforms and system architectures
So, here is a matrix of how the history of VR looks like, under this perspective. Have a look at this matrix here below I made to explain the concept. It contains all the main milestones in the history of Virtual Reality:
