A term that became fashionable among computer engineers and science fiction writers in the 1980s, displacing ‘‘virtuality’’, which had been coined in 1980; an early use of the term can be found in Damien *Broderick’s The Judas Mandala (1982), although its popularisation was largely due to Hans Moravec’s Mind Children: The Future of Robot and Human Intelligence (1988). It describes artificially generated scenarios into which computer users can ‘‘project themselves’’, usually by using eyepieces that allow them to look into a synthesised ‘‘world’’ and gloves that allow them to control their movements therein and manipulate its native objects.
Virtual reality (VR) is, in effect, an extrapolation of telepresence, by which individuals using the same equipment can ‘‘project’’ themselves into a distant environment, cameras projecting an image into their eyepieces while their gloved hands operate mechanical manipulators. That idea had emerged as imaginative spin-off from the idea of *television in such stories as Robert A. Heinlein’s ‘‘Waldo’’ (1942; by-lined Anson MacDonald), but had lain fallow for a long time while the technology caught up. Interest in it had been restimulated by such potential uses of telepresence as using robots to disarm bombs and carrying out delicate surgery with tiny instruments. The possible applications of telepresence in education also attracted a good deal of interest, reflected in such cautionary tales as Michael A. Burstein’s ‘‘Teleabsence’’ (1995) and Rajnar Vajra’s ‘‘Viewschool’’ (2004). Telepresence involving the use of android bodies became a popular motif in late twentiethcentury science fiction, as in Laura J. Mixon’s Proxies (1998).
In essence, virtual reality simply substitutes a computer-synthesised environment for the one relayed by cameras in telepresence. In an article in the November 1990 Analog John Cramer described VR as the ‘‘technological twin of telepresence’’ and detailed early applications of the idea in the Human Interface Technology Laboratory at the University of Washington. The idea that VR might be developed as an entertainment medium soon became commonplace as a background item in near-future science fiction, and was foregrounded in such stories as
Mick Farren’s The Feelies (1990).
The notion of artificial sensory input had been explored in speculative fiction long before the first appearance of telepresence, in such stories as E. M. Forster’s ‘‘The Machine Stops’’ (1909) and Laurence Manning and Fletcher Pratt’s ‘‘City of the Living Dead’’ (1932), where information is fed directly into the nervous system for the brain to decode as sensory experience. Other significant anticipations of aspects of VR include William Hjortsberg’s Gray Matters (1971).
A variant kind of ‘‘virtual reality’’ frequently featured in science fiction before the advent of personal computers involved various hypothetical means of synthesising dreams. Tailored dreams make the business of government easier in Clifford D. Simak’s ‘‘Worlds Without End’’ (1956), and the marketing of dreams becomes commercially significant in such stories as Damon Knight’s ‘‘Satisfaction’’ (1964; aka ‘‘Semper Fi’’), William F. Temple’s ‘‘The Legend of Ernie Deacon’’ (1965), and Lino Aldani’s ‘‘Good Night, Sophie’’ (trans. 1973). The rapid development of computer *games in the 1970s lent a sudden impetus to the notion that enhanced interactivity with gaming scenarios was not merely possible but inevitable and imminent. The kinds of active engagement implicit in games became common features of adventures in *cyberspace of the kinds promoted by such works as Vernor *Vinge’s ‘‘True Names’’ (1981) and William *Gibson’s Neuromancer (1984). The Manning-Pratt scenario is updated in the context of computer games in Rob Chilson’s Rounded with Sleep (1990). Fictional extrapolations of these notions that bring VR and the possible extrapolation of its technologies into sharp focus include Ian Watson’s Whores of Babylon (1988), Kim Newman’s The Night Mayor (1989), Pete D. Manison’s ‘‘The Golden Life’’ (1992), Jeff Noon’s Vurt (1993), Maureen McHugh’s ‘‘A Coney Island of the Mind’’ (1993), Alexander Besher’s RIM: A Novel of Virtual Reality (1994) and Mir (1998), David Brin’s ‘‘Reality Check’’ (2000), Ian R. MacLeod’s ‘‘Nevermore’’ (1998), and Dennis Danvers’ Circuit of Heaven (1998) and End of Days (1999). The development of multiuser computer role-playing games like Everquest (released 1999)—which reportedly had four hundred and fifty thousand participants by 2004—brought virtual reality close enough to realisation to make it a taken-for-granted feature of almost all early twenty-first-century science- fictional accounts of the near future. Tad Williams’ Otherland series (1996–2001) is a straightforward extrapolation of such domains. More elaborate private worlds are designed, customised, and populated to suit the requirements of the rich in Robert Reed’s ‘‘Like, Need, Deserve’’ (2003), while living in VR becomes a widely available lifestyle choice in Aaron A. Reed’s ‘‘Shutdown/Retrovival’’ (2003). The ‘‘virtuals’’ abandon their obsolete kin, the ‘‘physicals’’, to inevitable extinction in Chris Beckett’s ‘‘Piccadilly Circus’’ (2005).
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