The basic idea
A virtual reality headset places a screen, or two small ones, close to the eyes and changes the picture as the wearer’s head moves. If the image responds quickly and accurately enough, the brain accepts the scene as a space around it rather than a picture in front of it. Nearly every part of that description was worked out in laboratories long before the products existed, and the history of VR headsets is mostly a story of waiting for supporting technology to become small, fast and cheap enough.
Laboratory beginnings in the 1960s
Several separate efforts in the early 1960s are relevant, and it is a mistake to credit only one. Morton Heilig, a cinematographer, patented a stereoscopic head-mounted viewing device around 1960 and built a booth called the Sensorama, which combined film, sound, vibration and scent. It was a passive experience: nothing changed when the viewer moved. Around the same time, an engineering team working with a helicopter manufacturer built a remote-viewing system in which a camera moved in step with the operator’s head. That system tracked the head but showed a camera feed rather than a computer-generated world.
The best-known step came when Ivan Sutherland, working with Bob Sproull, built a head-mounted display driven by a computer in the late 1960s. It drew simple wireframe shapes that changed as the user looked around. It is often called the first VR headset, though that depends on how strictly “virtual reality” is defined, since the earlier devices lacked either the computer graphics or the head tracking. The device is usually remembered by the nickname Sword of Damocles because of the heavy support that held it above the wearer’s head.
Naming and the 1980s research push
The phrase “virtual reality” became widely used in the 1980s, and Jaron Lanier’s company VPL Research is commonly associated with popularizing it. VPL sold early headsets and gloves at very high prices to research groups. NASA and other government and university laboratories ran their own programs, mainly to explore training and remote operation. In these years the displays were often small cathode ray tubes or small liquid crystal screens, and the computers that drew the scenes cost far more than the headsets.
The arcade and console attempts of the 1990s
The early 1990s brought the first serious commercial push. Arcade operators installed seated and standing VR machines, with the Virtuality line from a British company among the best known. Players paid for short sessions, wore a bulky headset and played simple games with low-polygon graphics. The Lawnmower Man, a 1992 film, and heavy press coverage raised expectations well beyond what the hardware could deliver.
Home products followed. Sega announced a headset in the early 1990s that was never released as a consumer product. Nintendo’s Virtual Boy arrived in 1995 and was discontinued within about a year, hampered by a red monochrome display and discomfort during longer sessions. Other PC-based headsets of the period were expensive and offered low resolution and noticeable delay between head movement and picture. The commercial failures of this period are covered in more detail in the article on the history of VR gaming, and the short version is that the technology did not yet match the promise.
Why the 2010s were different
Several components matured at about the same time. High-resolution, low-cost displays developed for smartphones became available in huge quantities. Small motion sensors, also pushed forward by smartphones, made accurate head tracking inexpensive. And graphics cards had become powerful enough to render two slightly different views at high frame rates, which matters because low frame rates and delay are a major cause of motion sickness in headsets.
Oculus, a small company, ran a crowdfunding campaign in 2012 for a development kit headset, and Facebook agreed to acquire the company in 2014. Around the same period Google released Cardboard, a folding viewer that turned a phone into a basic headset at very low cost, and Samsung worked with Oculus on a phone-based headset sold in 2015. In 2016 the consumer Oculus Rift, the HTC Vive and Sony’s PlayStation VR reached the market. Standalone headsets that needed no computer or console followed later in the decade.
What happened after launch
Sales of early consumer headsets were more modest than some forecasts suggested, and the market grew gradually rather than overnight. Comfort, price, the need for a room of space and a limited library of software were common obstacles. Meanwhile, headsets found steady use in areas where the cost made sense, including industrial training and design, and parts of medicine. Those uses, along with games, education and therapy, have their own histories.
What the history shows
Three patterns repeat. The concept came first and the hardware followed decades later. Early publicity ran ahead of what the devices could do, and the 1990s show the cost of that gap. And the breakthrough of the 2010s owed less to a single new idea than to parts borrowed from other industries. Anyone reading claims of a single inventor or a single “first” headset should keep in mind that the field developed through overlapping work by artists, engineers, military researchers and companies.