quick Player One is all about the great unwashed using a practical macrocosm call the OASIS to make their dream come reliable . While virtual realness has only been a thing — at least in name — since the 1980s , people have been dream of life in fictional worlds for K of geezerhood . In a new sequence of “ That Looks intimate , ” io9 ’s Beth Elderkin looks at the real history of why we ’re so obsessed with practical reality .

What Is Lucid Dreaming?

Lucid dream is the deed of becoming cognizant that you ’re woolgather , while you ’re at rest . Most of the meter , people just wake up themselves up . But if you stay asleep , you may basically do whatever you want . The nexus between transparent dreaming and virtual realness is n’t just in similarity , but also in science . Research from Dr. Jayne Gackenbachhas foundthat people who use virtual realness are good able-bodied to go into a province of luculent dream .

The first knowntextual descriptionof lucid dreaming come up from the Upanishads , the Hindu unwritten tradition of spiritual lesson , philosophy , and proverbs , sometime between 500 BC and 100 CE . It ’s been cited over the centuries , but did n’t get its name until Marquis d’Hervey de Saint - Denyspublished his findingsabout the phenomenon in 1867 , coin the term “ limpid dream . ”

What About the Stereoscope?

The stereoscope is considered theancestor of practical reality . cook up in 1838 by Sir Charles Wheatstone , it used more or less altered versions of identical images to superpose a 3D range of a function . This allowed people to see landmark , countries , even planets they ’d never experienced before , paving the way for what ’s since been send for “ virtual touristry . ” Not only that , people would actuallyinvent storiesabout what they were seeing in the stereoscope , inspiring people to control the worlds they were receive . The stereoscope was the inhalation for the View - Master , which is still in economic consumption today ( and also has a VR adaptation ! ) .

Other Predecessors for Virtual Reality

In the 1930s , a science fabrication writer named Stanley Weinbaum releasedPygmalion ’s Spectacles , a story that bear the estimation of a pair of goggles that let the substance abuser receive another cosmos through touch , taste , and imagery . This is considered one of the first blueprints for practical reality . In the next years , we get machine like the Sensorama , which operate like aface - hugging immersive TV , as well as Nintendo ’s Virtual Boy . In 1987 , VPL Research founder ( and musician ) Jaron Lanier coined the term practical world as a manner to jointly describe all the gear mechanism ask to make it function . And the rest period , as we say , is practical story .

Ready Player OneVirtual reality

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