In 1938, Antonin Artaud described the illusory nature of characters and objects in the theatre as “la réalité virtuelle” in a collection of essays, Le Théâtre et son double. The English translation of this book, published in 1958 as The Theater and its Double, is the earliest published use of the term “virtual reality”.
The term “artificial reality“, coined by Myron Krueger, has been in use since the 1970s. The term “Virtual Reality” was used in The Judas Mandala, a 1982 science-fiction novel by Damien Broderick. The Oxford English Dictionary cites a 1987 article titled “Virtual reality“, but the article is not about VR technology. Virtual Reality in its modern usage was popularized by Jaron Lanier through his company VPL Research. VPL Research held many of the mid eighties VR patents, and they developed the first widely used HMD: EyePhone and Haptic Input Data Glove. The concept of virtual reality was popularized in mass media by movies such as Brainstorm and The Lawnmower Man. The VR research boom of the 1990s was accompanied by the non-fiction book Virtual Reality (1991) by Howard Rheingold. The book served to demystify the subject, making it more accessible to less technical researchers and enthusiasts.
VR 