The First Sci-Fi Author to Conceive of Virtual Reality.

Cafe Society
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Science fiction authors are amazing. They often conceive of scientific discovers, well, long before even some scientists do.

We all know of things like time travel. The Time Machine was published by H. G. Wells in 1895. But it says in his Wikipedia article, Wells had conceived the notion of time travel before, in a short story in 1888 titled “The Chronic Argonauts”. Astounding, no? This was many decades before Einstein, and his theory of relativity, you know.

Anyways, time travel is an easy one, for that reason. What I have always wondered, is who was the first sci-fi author to conceive of virtual reality?

I think most of us would tend to think it happened with the pilot episode of Star Trek: TOS, IN 1966, and then airing with “The Menagerie”, same year. But was that really the first time, it was ultimately conceived of?

Just to throw a wild theory out there, I offer A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens, in 1843. Hear me out. When the ghost of Christmases past shows Scrooge his old boy schoolmates, he tries to talk to them. But the ghost admonishes him, these are but “shadows” of the things that were.

Even I have to admit, though, that is kind of weak. I hope you all will come up with better examples than that.

Also, just to throw something out there, there is The Twilight Zone (1985) Dreams For Sale. In a future world, a young woman finds herself in the “Dreamatron”. Here is the Youtube video. (But watch it now. In a couple of weeks, they’ll probably have it down for copyright infringement;).)

As I said, by all means be creative. But be accurate too. I really want to know–and suspect I am not alone.

:):):):slight_smile:

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The Wikipedia article on virtual reality mentions a 1935 story called Pygmalion’s Spectacles by Stanley Weinbaum. It’s availableon Gutenberg and while I have only glanced through it, it seems a legitimate example of VR created through technology. As VR becomes more prominent in the real world I bet this story will become more famous.

Weinbaumapparently died of lung cancer shortly after writing this story. I wonder if he would have guessed that this story would be remembered many decades after he died.

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Not VR in the immersive sense, but EM Forster’s The Machine Stops has a future society where people live in small cells and communicate and see the world mostly by telepresence. So an important foundation document for the idea of VR worlds without actually postulating VR. Full text here

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There’s always Plato’s Cave

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Yes, not quite VR, but I thought it was a chilling vision of one possible end result of internet technology… written over a century ago! :eek:

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:clap clap clap: I’m saving this to read when I have time, for sure.

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FYI it’s very short.

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I think we need to set some ground rules here, on just what defines virtual reality. If it’s any illusions at all, then that’s ancient: People have been seeing visions in stories for as long as there have been stories. So I think we first need to establish that VR is visions produced by technology.

Then we have to ask how the technology works. Is it VR if the visions are produced by hallucinogenic drugs? Probably not, because the resulting hallucinations are not controllable by the one administering the drug.

There’s also the possibility of controllable hallucinations produced through direct brain stimulation of some sort: I’m guessing that this is what the “dreamatron” does. This could fill the same role that we associate with virtual reality, but the technology is very different.

Now, that “Pygmalion’s Spectacles” story that Lantern linked, that looks like it hits most of the bases: Moving pictures, captured via a sort of photographic technology, delivered one to each eye via lenses, to produce the illusion of three dimensions. It still isn’t truly interactive, except to the easily-misled mind, but if we’re going to demand interactivity, then the question becomes more like “what was the first science fiction story to feature a computer game”.

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The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch (Philip K. Dick, 1965) lays out a controllable drug-induced hallucination scenario.

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In a pre-World War Two era, would you consider telepathy to be sci-fi or fantasy?

In Burroughs’ Thuvia, Maid of Mars, 1916, the Lotharians have the power to create lifelike illusions in the minds of less-powerful beings. (Similar scenario to Trek’s “Menagerie”. They used the illusions as weapons, and they were dying out for lack of attachment to the real world.)

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“Spectator Sport” by John D. MacDonald (in his SF days). 1950. Pretty much nails modern VR.

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I think the “feelies” described in Brave New World (1931) are essentially VR.

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Too old?

Okay, how about Descartes’ Demon?

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When I was young, we had an antique Holmes stereoscope, from the 1860s, and the technology dates to the 1830s at least.

Television technology started to come into being in the 1910s, and it’s likely that people would have been aware that such a technology might be possible from at least a decade earlier.

The history of animation goes way back.

Ada Lovelace already figured out that a computational device would be able to generate music “on the fly” from algorithms (~1840), and the math for manipulating 3D space (e.g., the quaternion) was certainly in place by the 1840s as well, so it wouldn’t be a far stretch to visualize the possibility of generating 3D spaces on the fly.

I’d say that by 1900, it would have been completely reasonable for someone to come up with the idea of VR. The stories suggested from the 1930s certainly seem like they’re in the right time frame, though it’s possible that someone could have been thinking along these lines earlier than that given the information that they would have had available to them.

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A lot of people hold that Daniel F. Galouye’s novel Simulacron-3 (AKA Counterfeit World) is the first VR novel. It was published in 1964 as a paperback, and it does feature an electronically-created artificial reality (unlike earlier “artificial worlds” that take place wholly in the mind or in miniature models or the like). Certainly I don’t know of other examples.

The book was adapted for television in Germany in 1973 by Werner Fassbinder (!), and was turned into the movie The 13th Floor in 1999. It was overshadowed by the monster hit The Matrix (and to a lesser degree by David Cronenberg’s VR movie eXistenZ. But I really like The 13th floor, and think it deserves better.

According to the Wikipedia page on it, the book was adapted as a stage play – World of Wires (which is almost a direct translation of Fassbinder’s TV movie) in 2012, which I haven’t seen.