“Welcome to Wonderland!”

Source: Giphy

Just as Alice fell down the Rabbit Hole to find herself in a world completely removed from the one she inhabited, we have always had books and movies that acted as our own portals through which we made our way into another world — but not quite. The thing is, with books and movies, we live vicariously. Living someone else’s story, seeing life through someone else’s eyes, learning from someone else’s experiences. It’s no surprise then that there arose a need to create immersive experiences where we’re the protagonists of these stories ourselves. In a nutshell, this is what Virtual Reality is all about.

The fascination with immersive experiences can be traced back to days when the only means of recording an event was to either write it down, or to paint it. The inspiration behind the origin the panorama style of paintings (and centuries later, the pano mode on our smartphones) is sufficient evidence to that end: people were surrounded with circular canvases that depicted historical events, giving them both a 360-degree view of the entire landscape along with the feel of actually being a part of it themselves.

Panoramic Photography, a step forward from the paintings | Source: DePaul University

Slowly, we moved on to photography, where we were able to capture things happening around us in real time for posterity. The first form of virtual reality with photographs came from stereoscopes, which is said to be the basis of the technology behind VR today as well. Stereoscopes were devices that were used to enhance the illusion of depth for the user, and were eventually transformed into the View Master, a device then used for virtual tourism, with rotating cardboard disks of image pairs.