The roots of virtual reality can be traced back to 3D games and software where the environment is viewed from a first-person perspective. And these didn’t start with Doom either. Which was the first such title is disputed; it’s either space shooter Spasim or the blaster Maze War, both of which were released around 1974. They weren’t actually virtual reality, of course. The gamer played them on a computer screen, just like any other game. But it’s here one of its key features was established; the environment was viewed through the player’s eyes, instead of their being represented as an onscreen avatar (known as ‘own-eye perspective’). Later first-person games included the ZX81’s 3D Monster Maze, Wolfstein 3D and, of course, Doom.
From these basic first-person video games, the first-person shooter genre eventually took shape. When computers and consoles grew powerful enough, as well as moving through a virtual 3D environment, you could also look around in a 360° space by moving your in-game head. You could now look up and down, not just left and right.
Headsets with motion tracking had been worked on since the 1960s, mostly by the military for training and viewing dangerous situations. Myron W Krueger’s VIDEOPLACE appeared in 1975, and is generally regarded as the first interactive VR system. It didn’t feature a helmet, but its cameras and screens could measure the position of the user and react accordingly. The VITAL helmet, developed as a pilot training tool by McDonnell Douglas, included a head tracker. Also of note is Ivan Sutherland’s Sword of Damocles, a head-mounted display which hung from the ceiling and added computer-generation graphics to the user’s perception of the world.
The term ‘virtual reality’ was coined in 1987 by Jaron Lanier. His company, VPL, went on to release the Dataglove
