ABSTRACT
This chapter provides a cultural history of VR that eschews a starting point in the 1950s and instead traces a demand for consumer VR back to the public amusements of the Victorian era. Mediums such as the stereoscope and panorama presented the public with popular re-mediations of visual phenomena. The rise of cybernetics and pushback against the more brutally instrumental conceptualisations of the relationship between humans and computers in cybernetic theory demanded changes in human–computer interactions that brought the experiential nature of the amusements of the Victorian era to computing in the 1950s and 1960s. This reflected the emerging dominance of visual culture and the importance of it in computing. The first wave of VR proper in the 1980s and 1990s was characterised by discourses on how VR could ‘change the world’ by literally providing new worlds for experience, but it was hamstrung by the lack of computing power that could realise the visions of the pioneers of VR of the time. After ‘waiting for Moore’s Law’, VR re-emerged in the 2010s bearing some of the hallmarks of the digital culture that has grown in the absence of VR.
