This was the first device that preceded modern Head Mounted Displays (HMD). The Stereoscope consisted of two "stereo pairs," that is, two drawings of the same object, but at slightly different angles. The resulting effect on the user was to create the illusion of a three-dimensional image. In 1844, David Brewster expanded this design and added half-lenses in order to combine the two pictures into one frame (COMM12022 Cultural technologies web site). The invention of the three-dimensional movie process was an important development. The first attempt at 3D film was by MGM in 1937 The Third Dimension Murder'. But there was not a revival of 3D movies until the 1950s. In 1962, inventor Morton Heilig created the Sensorama Simulator frame (COMM12022 Cultural technologies web site). It was a quite big impact for viewers viewing of the colour stereo film with binaural sound, scents, wind; vibration. The next device of Virtual Reality was "ultimate display" that has been devised by Ivan Sutherland in 1964. It would include interactive graphics. It would also incorporate audio, smell and taste. In 1966, Sutherland started the idea of the graphics accelerator, a perfect part in modern virtual simulation. The military quickly recognized the potential of this idea in flight simulation, and spent most of the time designing helmets that could simulate a view of flight. Also, NASA began research on using the technology for space flight, and later, moon landings. Their Virtual Interactive Environment Workstation (VIEW) project incorporated head and hand tracking, a monochrome wide field-of-view stereo HMD, speech recognition, 3D audio output, and a tracked and instrumented glove. The company VPL now produces many ideas devised by VIEW, including the DataGlove, the EyePhone HMD, and computerised clothing frame (COMM12022 Cultural technologies web site). .
The technologies that have made Virtual Reality possible have come about in the last ten years.