The Design of Virtual Reality

The label Virtual Reality stuck to the new technology and just wouldn't let go. Since Jaron Lanier coined the phrase in 1986, it held the field through all opposition. Researchers at MIT shunned the phrase in the early 1990s. Instead of virtual reality, they spoke of virtual environments. The word in glowed with an aura similar to artificial intelligence, and computer scientists had already been burned once before by boldly promising to deliver machines that could think. At the University of North Carolina, engineers under Frederick Brooks found virtual reality unscientific. They too opted for the more buttoned-down virtual environments. Military scientists preferred synthetic environments. Researchers at the Human Interface Technology Lab at the University of Washington in Seattle urged virtual worlds. Against all protests, however, Lanier's phrase held its own. Virtual Reality continued appearing on successful grant applications as researchers conceded the power of VR to describe their holy grail. The poetic appeal of the phrase, its grandeur, struck the appropriate chord for the Englishspeaking community. Appropriate too was the subtle reference of the phrase to the historical origins of computing. The philosopher Leibniz was famous for his proto-computer as well as for his metaphysics of possible worlds.