The History of VR - In VR

Here at Magnolia we’re counting the days until our new Oculus Quest VR headset arrives (pre-ordered naturally). No, we’re not in the videogame business, but we are in the Digital Experience business, and this is the most significant consumer-level hardware in the DX space since the smartphone. So, in honor of the launch of the Quest we wanted to share some milestones in this amazing path of human invention and exploration of alternate realities.

Oculus has announced that the app store for the Quest will be very restrictive. So at the same time, let’s celebrate the ever-relevant freedom of the open web. You see, the Quest has a web browser, and the new WebVR and WebXR standards allow us to create VR experiences for it. That’s why we decided to publish this article as a VR Experience.

Open VR Experience

(Click the above link. Then, on a VR device, including your smartphone, click on the eyeglasses icon in the corner. On a computer, you can use the arrow keys on the keyboard to navigate, and click-and-drag to look around.)

Magnolia's headless capabilities and Stories App made it easy to pull this blog-post content into VR. You can find out how with this high-level overview & technical details and github example.

(Brands looking for a VR-ready CMS, check us out.)

The original virtual reality is totally natural, has an adoption rate of 100%, and has been around longer than humankind. Upon waking we know that our dreams are illusions, but while in them we think that they are real, even when things don’t really make a lot of sense. Why is it so hard to tie my shoes?

Morton Heilig built a prototype of his Experience Theater concept: The Sensorama. Not only did it play a 3D film with stereophonic sound, but also included wind, aromas, and shaking seats, all in an arcade style cabinet. Far out.

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The first VR headset only showed line drawings and relied on a huge contraption hung from the ceiling to track the head position. It was developed by Ivan Sutherland and students at the University of Utah.

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World on a Wire is a made-for-tv psycho film from West Germany based on the novel Simulacron-3 from Daniel Galouye. Our hero works at the Cybernetics institute on a supercomputer which runs a simulation program with over 9000 virtual people. After his boss dies under mysterious circumstances, Dr. Fred Stiller is promoted to the technical director role. When he contacts ‘Einstein’ the only virtual person which knows it is a simulation, it tries to escape to the real world. In the process Einstein reveals that the real world is in fact just another higher level simulation.

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MUD1 was the first “Multi User Dungeon”, a video game where many people could play at the same time and interact, over a network. It is considered the oldest virtual world. The game was purely text-based with no images at all, let alone 3D graphics. It was created by Roy Trubshaw and Richard Bartle as students at the University of Essex.

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The publishing of Neuromancer marks the birth of the Cyberpunk genre and is the first novel to win the Hugo award, the Nebula award and the Philip K. Dick award. In William Gibson’s dystopian near future, everyone is jacked into digital ‘decks’ which bring them into a global shared virtual environment, via ‘the matrix’. Case, the anti-hero, is a burnt out drug addict cyberspace hacker, who’s given a second chance - at a price.

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The TV show Star Trek: Next Generation, finally brought the simmering VR meme to the (geeky) mainstream with the Holodeck. This room on the USS Enterprise synthesizes life-like immersive holograms where crew members can go to take a vacation. Fortunately for us, there was always some glitch or another in the system, putting the crew into moral dilemmas, and making for some great entertainment.