Early Virtual Worlds. Pioneers of Extended Realities Between Creative Efforts and Technical Experimentations

Through an approach focused on the industrial history of the medium, this research seeks to reconstruct the genealogy of immersive technologies by conducting an in-depth investigation into the conceptual and technical origins of Extended Realities (XR) in the 1960s and 1970s. Over the last thirty years, efforts have been made to trace the medium’s history in order to legitimize its existence, identifying a number of pioneers in immersive realities who helped lay the cultural and technological groundwork for a new immersive market to emerge in the 1980s. The personalities of inventor and filmmaker Morton Heilig, computer scientist Ivan Sutherland, and artist Myron Krueger have been regarded as forerunners of the industrial growth of the media. This article attempts to trace the origins of this process by examining Heilig, Sutherland, and Krueger’s contributions with a dual purpose. First, it seeks to recreate the theoretical and conceptual foundations of immersive reality. Second, it looks at the larger cotext in which these pioneering attempts evolved.