Defying Reality: The Inside Story of the Virtual Reality Revolution - Hardcover

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

David M. Ewalt is a contributing editor to Forbes Magazine, and the author of Of Dice and Men: The Story of Dungeons & Dragons and the People Who Play It. Ewalt is an authority on the intersections among gaming, technology, and business. He writes for a variety of print and online outlets, and frequently appears as an expert guest on TV, radio, and podcasts. He lives in Brooklyn, New York.

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Chapter 1

Pygmalion's Spectacles

There is a unicorn in a cavern under an ancient forest in France. I've seen it myself, even though it wasn't really there; I've stood in front of it, even though its home is a place where no one can go.

The unicorn is painted on the wall of Lascaux Cave, a subterranean complex in the VŽz�re Valley, about two hours' drive east of Bordeaux. Seventeen thousand years ago, some of the first modern humans in Europe decorated the caverns with hundreds of images of animals, symbols, and abstract shapes. In 1940, it was rediscovered by a group of teenagers and became one of the most famous archaeological sites in the world.

For decades following the discovery, countless tourists flocked to Lascaux. Henri Breuil, a French priest and archaeologist who was one of the first researchers to study the caves, called it the Sistine Chapel of prehistory; after artist Pablo Picasso saw the paintings, he lamented that his entire generation of revolutionary artists had "invented nothing new." But the ancient drawings were fragile, and the presence of so many visitors took a toll. In 1963, the French government banned the public and locked the doors.

Fortunately, technology allows a modern tourist to sneak inside. Lascaux comes to life in 360-degree videos and virtual reality tours; I'd seen photos of the caves and studied their paintings in college, but it took seeing that unicorn in VR to really understand the place. Even though the French government has built detailed replicas of the caves for people to visit, the virtual version makes for a better trip-it's appropriately claustrophobic and free from the distracting presence of other tourists.

It's also a particularly fitting way to visit, because Lascaux may be the oldest example in human history of an attempt to create a virtual world. You'd never know it from looking at photographs, but when you stand inside the caves-virtually or in person-the intention is clear. Just like VR headsets block the real world from view, the caverns separate a visitor from the forest above. Instead of drawing with pixels on a screen, the cave artists used pigment on rock walls. Lascaux's creators used the topography of the caverns to create immersion: a chamber decorated with sketches of wild horses isn't just a jumble of drawings, but a herd that surrounds the viewer. They used perspective tricks to make the illustrations seem three-dimensional: the body of an ox is presented in profile, but its head is turned to face the viewer. And they used the shape of the rock to give their art depth and shape; for example, a twist in a wall makes a deer appear to turn away as it dashes around a corner.

No one knows why the people who created the caves went to so much trouble. Perhaps the goal was to enthrall the viewer in order to teach them something, like an Upper Paleolithic version of a flashy how-to video on YouTube: As writer and technology expert Howard Rheingold suggests, "subterranean cyberspaces" like Lascaux may have served to "imprint information on the minds of the first technologists." Or maybe the caves were immersive entertainment, an attempt to tell a story in the most realistic way possible, to convey the excitement of hunting without the risk of getting gored or trampled.

In the millennia after the cavemen left their caves, increasingly advanced civilizations created increasingly sophisticated immersive entertainment. Around 2,500 years ago, the ancient Greeks built their own VR viewers out of wood, stone, and marble-the word theater comes from the Greek verb theasthai, or literally, "to view." These technological marvels exploited Then-cutting-edge science in order to trick audiences, including acoustics (semicircular amphitheaters enhanced sound waves, allowing large audiences to hear voices at a distance) and mechanics (a wooden crane called a mechane lifted actors into the air and made them appear to be flying; it's the device that made possible the deus ex machina). Elaborate costumes, handheld props, and painted scenery panels helped complete the illusion, transforming the stage into a fantastic environment.

Other cultures created virtual worlds through visual arts like sculpture and painting. Qin Shi Huang, the first emperor of China, started building a city-sized mausoleum around 246 bc, filling it with terra-cotta sculptures of his soldiers, pets, musicians, and palace officials-a kind of simulated palace for him to occupy in the afterlife. The Romans used frescoes to transform their homes from dingy concrete into more pleasant realities, covering entire walls with illusionistic images. Buildings in the city of Pompeii, preserved after the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in ad 79, reveal interior rooms painted so that they appear to have balconies and windows that open up onto lush imaginary landscapes.

Chinese artists created immersive art using paintings on long scrolls of paper. Gu Hongzhong's eleven-foot-wide The Night Revels of Han Xizai is a record of an actual night in the life of a tenth-century government minister. According to legend, it was created so emperor Li Yu could witness Han Xizai's debauchery, including listening to music and watching women dancing. In the twelfth century, the artist Zhang Zeduan created a ten-by-seventeen-foot depiction of the city of Kaifeng, Along the River During the Qingming Festival, which includes accurate images of buildings, animals, and more than eight hundred people. By virtue of their size, real-life subjects, and narrative content, these panoramic paintings amount to another kind of virtual reality that transports the viewer back to dynastic China.

In 1787, the Irish-born artist Robert Barker took that idea a huge step further. Inspired by the sweeping 360-degree view from Calton Hill, a spot in central Edinburgh, he painted a massive seventy-foot-wide watercolor landscape of the city and hung it on the inside of a cylindrical surface. Viewers stood on a platform in the middle, surrounded by the painting, so that it simulated the experience of actually being in Scotland. He patented the technique as the Panorama, coining the now common term from the Greek words pan and horama-"all that which is seen."

After first exhibiting the work in Edinburgh and Glasgow, Barker took it to London. Reviews were good, but audiences were limited, so Barker created another, bigger panorama, this time of the London skyline. English viewers liked that better, and the artist earned a small fortune selling tickets to see it. In 1793, Barker went even bigger, constructing a building in Leicester Square that could display two immense panoramas, one of them stretching floor to ceiling in a three-story-tall rotunda. The new venue became an immensely popular attraction and showed a variety of scenes, including foreign cities and historical military battles. By the early nineteenth century, panoramas were a worldwide phenomenon, with similar sites constructed in cities across the globe. The immersive experiences were even touted as a high-tech alternative to actual travel.

In 1822, the French artists Charles-Marie Bouton and Louis Daguerre combined the panorama's massive imagery with elements of theater to create an attraction they called the Diorama-scenes made of multiple paintings on linen curtains over on a stage, constructed in such a way that when bright lights were shone on different spots, the images would appear to move and change. The shows were a big hit and were also copied around the world; later versions added sound effects, stage props, and even live actors to enhance the illusion. (Fueled in part by his success with the Diorama, a few decades later Daguerre pioneered another way to render...