Sensorama

Abstract: In Aldous Huxley's Brave New World (1932), audiences flock to the feelies, a hybrid of cinema and Sensorama that communicates the kisses and couplings onscreen to the individual viewers, hunched in their seats clutching onto decidedly phallic knobs. Where audiences attending a performance of Pygmalion or King Lear might feel fear, anger, empathy, or pity, the feelies presumably supplant the audience's emotional interaction with the performance with a passive reception of the physical sensations experienced by the characters before them. In the future-world of William Gibson's Neuromancer (1984) trilogy, these real-but-vicarious sensations are interiorized as audiences turn to an entertainment implant called "simstim" that completely immerses its users in a role they have chosen as part of an adventure. They become the characters instead of simply watching them. The sensations they experience are neither empathetic nor vicarious but "real"-although, if a simstim protagonist were to end up in the jaws of a hungry Bengal tiger during a jungle adventure, the user would presumably come out of the "game" with viscera intact. By 1992, at the Trocadero in London's Piccadilly Circus, teenagers were willingly surrendering fivepound notes in exchange for head-mounted displays and a crack at playing with Virtual Reality. When they move their heads, the scene before their eyes changes accordingly. When they are jostled in their cars or tanks or

Abstract: Oculus Rift Oculus VR, https://www.oculus.com In 1962, American cinematographer Morton Heilig patented an arcade game that allowed players to fly in a helicopter above the urban landscape or ride on a motorcycle through city streets, all for the price of a game of pinball. Heilig’s machine, the Sensorama, produced immersive simulacra of various urban experiences through the synthesis of film projection and mechanically generated wind, vibration, and odors. While the Sensorama never entered production, its prototype marked the birth of a new type of electromechanical simulation game that by the end of the 1960s would displace the mechanical pinball machine as an arcade staple and pave the way for the fully electronic games of the 1970s. The story of the Sensorama remains one of the founding myths of virtual reality (VR), a loosely defined, multidisciplinary, and, some would say, hubristic area of computer science that emerged between 1960 and the early 1980s. VR proposes that, by way of head-mounted displays and sophisticated input devices, users might inhabit computer-generated three-dimensional worlds with the same degree of “presence” (as it is called in VR) as they inhabit their actual material environments. To the historian or student of architecture, then, VR offers the possibility of exploring a past world as easily and as fully as the present one. The degree to which presence is achieved depends, of course, not only on the sophistication of the technology but also on the user’s desire to accept the experience as real along with the persuasiveness of the rhetoric by which the user’s expectations have been conditioned. Just as it was for Goethe, whose travel accounts contain as many stories of disappointment as of awe, presence depends on the calibration of actual experience to prior expectations. VR made promises it could not always keep. In contrast to computer networks, or even artificial …

Abstract: Towards the end of the Fifties film director Morton Heilig, universally known as the Father of Virtual Reality, presented the world with a prototype named Sensorama. Today, after nearly 70 years, that dream may be about to come true: thanks to technological progress, which has finally met the standards of Heilig's brainchild, and to the huge financial investments made by the gaming industry, virtually anyone will have the opportunity to live a life-like, and at the same time unconventional, full-sensory experience. However, far beyond the Entertainment industry, the potential applications of Virtual Reality could branch off in several areas of interest; in particular, it could have a significant impact on the field of Education. While a large number of major universities throughout the US and the technologically advanced Asia are not only implementing experimental VR projects, but also producing significative results in terms of knowledge acquisition, the theme of our debate is this: is it possible for a system, conceived and created with entertainment as its ultimate purpose, to become the cornerstone of a worldwide Didactic Revolution?

Abstract: It has been suggested that 360-degree immersive film viewed in virtual environments, does not allow for a sense of presence owing to the lack of interactivity, agency and realism. This paper outlines the findings of a research project to evaluate how such a sense of presence can be enabled through the introduction of multi-sensory input to the viewing experience. Using an original 360-degree film that was shot in Hong Kong’s Chungking Mansions as a basis for research, this paper interrogates Ryan’s assertion that Virtual Reality (VR) that combines interactivity, immersion and narrativity is an example of the “total art” that VR producers need to aspire to. By adding changes in heat and scent to the viewing experience, the extent to which those sensory stimuli, which would not normally be part of a viewing experience, lead to an increased feeling of presence is evaluated. In doing so, we suggest that the viewing experience may not need all three elements of total art to be equivalent in order for a meaningful viewing experience to occur.