Another early example of a virtual reality system was the Sensorama machine. The Sensorama machine, introduced by Morton Heilig in 1962 is one of the earliest known multi-sensorial devices. The Sensorama simulated a motorcycle ride through New York and engaged all the senses: The person would see the street approaching by on the color display, feel the wind generated by fans, hear the noise of the motorcycle via the stereo sound system and smell petrol fumes, pizza snackbars all carefully triggered at the right time to create a multi-sensorial experience. Audiences could not interact or change the course of the experience, the Sensorama is a fixed movie augmented with touch and smell []. The machine was considered for use in arcades but ended-up too complex and expensive to build and maintain, leaving the Sensorama in the prototype stage. Even today, the inclusion of in particular taste and odor in virtual reality remains largely unadressed.

Multi-sensorial immersive experiences would also find its way in architectural spaces at around the same time. An early example is the Poème Electronique, a multimedia spectacle that was presented at the Philips pavilion on the Brussels World Expo in 1958. Architect Le Corbusier concentrated on the concept and images while Edgar Varèse composed the music. The Poème Electronique showed the rise of human civilization and unlimited possibility of a future enabled by technology through a sequence of projections on the inner walls of the building with accompanying music. The installation proved difficult to run and maintain and would be decommissioned immediately after the world fair.

During the world exposition of the 1970 in Osaka Japan, a more succesful innovation was shown that can be seen in theme parks and cinemas througout the world: the IMAX film projection system. The desire to increase the visual impact of film had already a long story, but the IMAX system was very different and unique compared to normal projectors. First, a standard IMAX theatre has a huge rectangular screen. A typical IMAX screen is 16 meter high by 22 meters wide. Second, IMAX films are shot and printed on huge film stock. Most films come in 35 mm format, some theater films have 70 mm. IMAX film format is 15/70 film format: Each frame is 70 mm wide and 15 perforations wide, the film size is about 10x bigger which gives high resolution even on the typical IMAX screens size. Because the film is so heavy and large, the IMAX movie projector is very different compared to a normal projector. Since the debut of IMAX in the 1970s, IMAX has continued to push the envelope with e.g. domes to be completely surround, 3D technology for intense 3D films, 6 channel sound system for immersive audio and more []. IMAX movies however remain costly to both produce and present in theatres so the application has been restricted to theme parks and large cinemas. In 2020, there are estimated 1849 IMAX systems. In 2018 there were in contrast over 182 thousand digital cinema screens – almost 100x as much.

The first augmented reality environment is generally considered to be the Sword of Damocles, created in 1968 by computer scientist Ivan Sutherland. Sutherland’s system displayed the output of a computer program in a stereoscopic display. The image would be a wireframe that would seem to float in the space augmenting the real view. To create the necessary realism, the image the computer program generated depended on the position of the user’s gaze and this is why head tracking was necessary. The head mounted display had to be attached to a mechnical arm suspended from the ceiling for tracking the head movement and partially its weight. The user had have his head securely fastened into the device, hence the reference. As Sutherland writes in his early paper about the device, it worked right away. “Even with this relatively crude system,” he wrote, “the three-dimensional illusion was real.” He continued that “the goal of Augmented Reality is to create a system in which the user cannot tell the difference between the real world and virtual augmentation of it.”

As in the 19th century, the 20th century would continue to alternate between advances in virtual realities that replace the users’ view of reality completely and artificial realities that augmented the users’ view without being encumbered by the use of goggles or gloves. In 1975, Myron Krueger established his artificial reality laboratory called the Videoplace. The Videoplace is an early example of an interactive immersive environment that allowed users in separate rooms to interact with each other through a combination of projectors, video cameras, and computer vision and content generation algorithms. For Krueger it was these relationships between action and response that were most important: “The beauty of the visual and aural response is secondary.  Response is the medium”. [Videoplace]. Users could visually see the results of their actions and each other on the screen in colored silhoettes and in that way engage with each other. The sense of presence was enough that users pulled away when their silhouettes intersected with those of other users.

Sofar in our historic retrospective we have seen many examples of simulated realities where people were passive observers either by experiencing a multi-sensorial immersive space surrounding them or a virtual reality pulled in front of their eyes. What is missing is the ability to interact with the environment which brings us to games. For millenia children are playing games of make believe, pretending to be someone else and enact performances without an audience. Adults too have been playing games, backgammon and Go are two examples of table-top board games that date back thousands of years. Then as now with modern computer games, players could be highly engaged into the game, no doubt helped by the sometimes high gains for the winner of the game. Before we explore the rise of computer games in the 1980s, it is worth while to stop our journey forward in time to the emergence of the first Live Action Role Playing Games or LARP in the late 1970s because this format of games is both highly immersive and interactive.

LARPs can be seen as table-top games that have transcended from the 2D plane into the real world. Participants physically portray their characters and persue certain goals within the fictional setting represented by the real world and rules of the game while interacting with other in character. One of the examples is Conquest of Mythodea, a long running large LARP event organized in Germany each year since 2012 in August that attracts over 8000 participants and 1600 non player characters. Together all participants fill the fantasy continent “Mythodea” with life and try to solve over 1000 plots full of riddles, adventures and battles between good and evil. The actions of the participants influence the story and future of Mythodea.

While computer games had been around for some time, the first example of multiple players competing together in one game is “Empire” in 1973. Empire was a turn-based game which was created for the PLATO (Programmed Logic for Automatic Teaching Operation) system. The PLATO system can be seen as an early predecessor of the Internet in that it enabled online communities to interact over a single mainframe computer for educational purposes. By the early 1970s, PLATO was able to support 1,000 simulatenous users and a connection speed of 1,200 bps (bits per second) which was sufficiently fast to support the text output for teaching applications – and playing games. PLATO usage logs show that users spent around 300,000 hours playing Empire between 1978 and 1985. Another early example of a multiplayer network game was the network first-person shooter game MidiMaze released on the Atari ST. MidiMaze can be described as a 3D version of Pac Man that could connect up to 16 consoles by linking the MIDI-OUT port to one computer to the MIDI-IN port of another. Multiplayer gaming over networks really started to take off with “Doom” in 1993, a first-person shooter with early 3D graphics. In addition to a single campaign where the player controls a space marine through a series of levels, Doom also featured two multiplayer modes (cooperative and deathmatch) playable over a Local Area Network (LAN) that became highly popular on university campuses and elsewhere. The LAN party was born and games would start to become increasingly addictive.

Most of the examples on our journey were to inspire, entertain, escape the world we live in. If they had local economic impact such as the Naumachinae in Ceasar time in Rome or more recently the Conquest of Mythodea in Germany, their impact in terms of euros spent would be dwarfed by the rise of the world wide web and e-commerce. The World Wide Web became publicy available on August 6, 1991 when people outside the Conseil Européen pour la Recherche Nucléaire (CERN) were invited to join the new web community. Tim Bernes-Lee and others ensured that the CERN made the underlying code available on a royalty-free basis and started the standardization of the Hypertext Markup Language and Internet protocols which led to its rapid growth and success (Tim Bernes-Lee, Weaving the Web]. The early websites were little more than lookup pages called portals or content pages where people could find university or company information. This changed on July 5, 1994 when Jeff Bezos started a little book shop (Note: Computer Literacy, a Silicon Valley bookstore, began selling books from its inventory to its technically astute customers in 1991. However, the promise of Amazon.com was to deliver any book to any reader anywhere.) on the Web. Less than ten years later in the year 2000 there were over 360 million users on the Web and although Amazon had still to made a profit, its revenues were reaching $1 billion.

As the web became increasingly a place for doing business and startups who would offer new services in the late 1990s, multiplayer games started to use the Internet network protocol to enable communication and gaming over large distances. Although the term e-sports had already been in use to refer to competitive multiplayer computer games, these games had to be played locally in special organized LAN parties with prize money. The Internet allowed local e-sports events to become truly global tournaments where players around the world played for large prizes. The South Korean capital Seoul organized in the 2000 the first World Cyber Games where games such as Counter Strike and Starcraft 2 were played. Starcraft 2 became a highly popular game in South Korea and how addictive games could be was shown in very sady way in 2005 when the first person, a 28-year old man from South Korea, died after playing Starcraft at an internet cafe in the city of Taegu for 50 hours with few breaks.

In 2001, in order to market the movie A.I. Artificial Intelligence, Microsoft game designers conceived of an elaborate murder mystery that would be played out over hundreds of websites, email messages, voice mail messages and fake advertisements and other events both in the virtual and real world. The “Beast” would become the seminal example of the nascent Alternate Reality Game genre involving over three million active participants from all over the world at one point in time. A large and active community that called themselves Cloudmakers teamed up to analyze and solve the puzzles and forced the puppetmasters to create new subplots and materials to keep the game progressing. That alternate reality game genre combined elements of live active role playing, multiplayer computer games and the Internet in a new way by cross-media storytelling but with less rules and guidelines than (computer) games.

Purely virtual reality worlds also started to grow in size. In 2003, Second Life created by Linden Labs studio, saw its first users to inhabit the virtual world. Second Life is an international virtual world where people can develop a second life in a virtual 3D environment. People can create their own 3D chairs, tables, kitchens, living rooms, gardens, homes, streets and cities with the in-game editors or pay for virtual assets if you don’t want to spend that time and effort. Dubbed as the new world wide web, companies and organizations were quick to start their own offices and places in Second Life to connect with their customers. At its height around four years later, Second Life counted more than 5 million accounts of which one million was regularly active. Some hoped that the second life became their first life but most users found it too cumbersome and time-consuming to create content themselves and too little to do as there is nothing to win or lose, no specific rules. The users of Second Life shifted to the social media networks in particular Facebook in 2005 where it was much easier to create and post comments online.

During the early 2000s, the way people started to interact with electronic devices started to change. The decline of computing costs and growth of computing power, enabled us to own not just one (personal) computer in our homes but many connected, fixed and mobile devices. Ubiquitous computing became a reality.

The first geocache was hidden on May 3, 2000 by Dave Ulmer who posted the coordinates in a GPS Internet group. Ulmer put videos, books, food and money in his first cache that was found 3 days later by Mike Teague. Geocaching became popular with low-cost mobile GPS devices that allowed everybody to create or follow a treasure trail on the basis of GPS coordinates.

The fastest growing mobile devices became the mobile phone which blurred the lines between the real and virtual world even further. Perplex City in 2005 started to incorporate SMS messaging for players to interact to solve puzzles. In 2005, Google started Google Maps to create a layer over our streets, highways and cities to help us navigate and and with Google Earth we could travel around the world instantenously wondering what it would be like to visit some remote island in the Pacific ocean, the shopping malls of Singapore, the canals in Venice.

Mobile computing game devices, GPS devices, mobile phones, calculators, dictaphones, we were surrounded by mobile devices each with their own specific form and function, this started to change on January 9, 2007 when Steve Jobs introduces iPhone in 2007 – YouTube as one device that would combine all these functions in one device. The iPhone smartphone and later Android smartphones accelerated the development of augmented reality, mobile gaming and social media, greatly increasingly the amount of time we spent per day in simulated reality. With the birth of the smartphone in 2007 we end our trip through history and start to move into present time.