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"The point sticks in your head: physics rules. Virtue does not triumph unless the physics allows it."
- Larry Niven
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| Virtual Reality Construct | ||
| A means of projecting a virtual reality experience without special headsets. |
Science fiction has presented many kinds of virtual reality technovelgy over the years; here is a very early (and perhaps the first) description of a completely immersive virtual environment.
| At once the cluttered children's room disappeared and they were surrounded by a wall of hot swirling gray and incandescent orange. It cleared...
And at once Forrester and the two children were seated in the bridge of a spaceship. The toys were gone, the furnishings replaced by bright metal instruments and flickering, whistling gauges. And outside crystal panels surged the devastating chromosphere of a sun. Forrester shrank back instinctively from the heat before he realized that there was none. It was illusion. But it was perfect. "By God!" he cried admiringly. "How was that done?" ...The calm voice of the joymaker replied at once. "The phenomenon you are currently inspecting, Man Forrester, is a photic projection on a vibratory curtain. An interference effect produces a virtual image on the surface of an optical sphere with the nexus of yourself and your companions as its geometric center..." |
| Technovelgy from The Age of The Pussyfoot,
by Frederik Pohl. Published by Ballantine in 1966 Additional resources -
|
In reading this, I'm strongly reminded of a real-world technology: the Heliodisplay, a device that projects an image on what appears to be a fine mist. I saw this at the Wired magazine NextFest exhibition in Chicago, and it really works.
Compare to virtual reality from The Theatre and Its Double (1938) by Antonin Artaud.
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'And now they wre busily transforming all their companions, and so on, and so on...'
'Why, a clockwork dancer, or, better still, one that would go by electricity and never run down...'
'Maybe the individual intelligence of each Cubic pools into a group intelligence...'
'Looks like she has bought the Avatar Construction Set and put together her own...'
'Across the ground something small and metallic came, flashing in the dull sunlight of midday.'
'A broken circle with arrows pointing to a right-hand flow appeared in the chalf.'
'The object seemed melted together like wax — nothing was distinguishable.'
