Dan, a young man, meets a professor who created a pair of goggles that transport users to another world in the 1935 short story Pygmalion's Spectacles. Albeit American sci-fi essayist Stanley Weinbaum envisions an imaginary world utilizing a couple of goggles, it was a look into the gadget that would permit individuals to see things in an alternate reality.
However, despite the passage of time, Weinbaum's account is still relevant due to the competition among technology companies to bridge the gap between the virtual and real worlds through wearable headsets.
The term "extended reality"—where users can see the real world through the headset and also interact with digital objects projected onto the real world—seems to be getting a lot of attention since Apple's Vision Pro, a mixed-reality headset that costs $3500. However, "extended reality" is a concept that has existed for a very long time.
We look at the history of Extended Reality (XR), specific details about virtual reality and augmented reality, and the people whose contributions to immersive technology have had the greatest impact.
Although virtual reality and 3D technology were developed in the 1830s, they are not new. The idea of a "stereoscope" was presented to the Royal Society of London by Professor of Experimental Philosophy at King's College, London, Sir Charles Wheatstone, who only used drawings. The concept of "stereopsis" or "binocular vision," in which the brain combines two images of the same object taken from different points to produce a single 3D image, was discussed briefly in Wheatstone's paper.
This prompted the advancement of the main stereoscopic watcher in 1838 which made the deception of 3D. Despite the fact that it was intended to examine binocular vision, the stereoscope likewise went about as a type of drawing-room diversion. No big surprise Wheatstone's creation of a stereoscope helped lay the basis for current 3D and VR innovation. In point of fact, the majority of current headsets display virtual objects in a third dimension using stereoscopic displays.
From the 1950s to the 1970s, Morton Heilig, a visionary inventor and cinematographer, introduced the world to the first VR machine. While Wheatstone's work on the stereoscope will always be credited with establishing the foundation for 3D and VR technology,
The "Sensorama Simulator," designed by Heilig in 1956, was a large booth that could hold four people. The "revolutionary motion picture system" known as Sensorama played a 3D movie while stereo sound, aromas, fans, and a vibrating chair created an immersive sensory environment. Heilig shot, produced, and edited six short films to demonstrate the VR machine's capabilities. The Sensorama Machine was granted a patent in 1962, ten years later.
In spite of the fact that Sensorama furnished a 3D presentation with stereoscopic sound, it was not intuitive and just played prerecorded short movies. However, two Philco Corporation engineers, Comeau and Bryan, were already considering ways to advance Heilig's concept. They developed the "Headsight," a VR/Mixed-Reality headset with head-tracking technology that featured one screen for each eye. Presented in 1961, the Headsight was the primary movement following head-mounted show (HMD).
Despite the fact that the Headsight was better than anything found in the vivid tech space, it wasn't intended for augmented reality encounters (the term didn't exist around then). Instead, the Headsight was made with the military in mind so that they could remotely observe potentially dangerous situations. Together with a remote camera, it tracked the user's head movements so they could look around more naturally. The first step toward a fully functional virtual reality headset was acquiring eyesight.
The first headset connected to a computer-generated 3D environment was created seven years later by computer scientist Ivan Sutherland and his student Bob Sproull. The head-mounted show, named The Blade of Damocles, was excessively weighty and must be mounted to the roof. However, the first headset to be connected to a computer enabled users to view a 3D world created by computers. Yes, wireframe rooms and objects made up the basic computer visuals. However at that point, the headset permitted clients to encounter a PC produced 3D climate interestingly, and that excessively in 1968. In a sense, the headset was designed more for augmented reality than virtual reality.
After that, in 1978, MIT developed the Aspen Movie Map, a novel approach to taking a virtual tour of Aspen, Colorado. Users would be taken on a computer-generated tour of the city of Aspen. It was made by taking pictures while driving through the city in a car. The virtual tour was intended to be interactive, like Google Street Views, but headsets were not required.
From the 1980s to the 1990s, Jaron Lanier marked the beginning of VR and supported application development. Lanier alongside Thomas Zimmerman established VPL Exploration, the principal organization to sell VR goggles and gloves. Established in 1985, Lanier, who is credited with begetting the expression "computer generated reality", truly took VR to an unheard of level. Lanier was a pioneer in virtual reality because his company not only developed commercial VR hardware but also developed software for it.
At a certain point, Lanier's organization was selling VR headsets for as high as $49,000. The greatest obstacle Lanier had to overcome was transporting the headset and giving a demonstration to those who were interested in the technology at a time when virtual reality was still in its infancy and was only available to a small number of people due to the high cost of the computer and headset.
However, as the 1990s approached, virtual reality received a significant boost from VR arcade machines, particularly among the general public. A number of arcade games and arcade machines from the Virtuality Group took gamers into a brand-new 3D gaming world. At the same time, Sega, the Japanese gaming giant, announced that it would launch a VR headset compatible with its Genesis and Mega Drive consoles. However, Sega never made the headset available. It was ended not long after its huge uncover at the Customer Hardware Show, and the organization from that point forward never gotten back with a VR headset. However, in 1994, the company released the motion simulator arcade machine Sega VR-1.
However, things were going to change in the computer generated simulation market with the passage of Nintendo yet nobody expected it would be just terrible. The Virtual Boy was made available by Nintendo in North America in 1995. The console promised virtual reality gaming, but it didn't deliver on every front. Not only did the console have an odd appearance, but neither did the games. Through a viewfinder, they were essentially red lines stacked on top of each other. Nintendo purportedly sold 770,000 Virtual Kid units overall during its restricted life expectancy, making it the most exceedingly terrible Nintendo control center ever.
For a very long time, the consumer VR market was pretty quiet following Nintendo's Virtual Boy's failure. Most brands that were dynamic in VR at one particular moment had either quit exploring different avenues regarding VR or briefly put future gadgets on pause. However, research in virtual reality (VR) and augmented reality (AR)—the term "augmented reality" was first used in 1990 by Boeing researcher Tom Caudell—continued.
In fact, by the late 1990s, interest in augmented reality (AR), a technology that combines the digital world with real elements, had begun to increase. In 1998, Sportsvision broadcast the first live NFL game in AR, and after a year, Nasa utilized expanded reality for flying the X-38 by making a unique AR dashboard for route. Additionally, ARQuake, the world's first outdoor augmented reality game, debuted in the early 2000s.
From 2010 to 2020, however, Palmer Luckey, then 18 years old, created the first Oculus Rift headset prototype, which ushered in a new era for the XR market. It relied on a computer's processing power to deliver the images and had a 90-degree field of vision. In 2012, Luckey then launched a successful Kickstarter crowdfunding campaign for the brand-new Oculus Rift VR headset. Luckey raised $2.4 million, and in 2014, Facebook purchased his company Oculus VR for approximately $2 billion.
Facebook's interest in virtual reality piqued the interest of both investors and the general public, despite the fact that the market for VR headsets was small at the time. Advancement in the VR space accelerated quicker than anticipated, and marks like Sony had started to deal with VR headsets. A lot of attention was paid to the announcement of Project Morpheus, a VR headset for the PlayStation 4 (PS4).
Even though headsets like the HTC Vive and Rift gained popularity, they still targeted enthusiasts. At that time, Google introduced its first Cardboard device, a low-cost smartphone VR viewer made of cardboard. Soon after, Samsung introduced its Gear VR headset, which requires a smartphone to operate.
In parallel, Big Tech was very interested in augmented reality. In 2012, Google overwhelmed everybody by revealing its Google Glass AR glasses, AR glasses which overlay advanced data onto this present reality and permit clients to get to applications like Gmail. Google Glass, on the other hand, was not well received due to privacy concerns and its high price.
The HoloLens headset from Microsoft was then released in 2016, and the technology, which combines the digital and real worlds, heavily relied on "mixed reality." "Pokémon Go," one of the most popular AR mobile games of the time, was released at this time. In fact, even Apple wanted to enter the AR market by releasing an augmented reality developer kit known as ARKit with the intention of bringing augmented reality experiences to iPhones and iPads.
Many large and small startups entered the XR market between 2017 and 2019, but Magic Leap stood out the most. The ephemeral and occult start-up raised a lot of money from investors, but its first headset, which was released in 2018, was a huge failure. Since then, the company has shifted its focus to headset applications in the healthcare and industrial sectors.
Is it possible for Metaverse to return in 2023?
The Metaverse—Mark Zuckerberg's term for a fully developed digital world that exists beyond our own—has suffered catastrophically over the past two years. It's as yet a nerd(y) idea that he attempted to drive into the standard by changing the name of his person to person communication organization to Meta in 2021 and afterward emptying billions of dollars into as yet creating computer generated reality. Everyone has agreed this year, especially since Apple's Vision VR came out, that Zuckerber's Metaverse strategy might not be what people want.
In spite of the underlying conviction many had about Apple and its XR technique, individuals are presently supporting the Cupertino-based organization's course of making headsets famous after others neglected to catch the public's creative mind. The headset is particularly exhilarating for developers. Also, the Vision Pro costs $3,500 and is intended for developers and true Apple fans. However, despite Meta selling millions of Quest headsets, the Metaverse, which is still a ghost digital town, makes much more sense when viewed from Apple's perspective as a spatial computing platform rather than a single device.