A 3-D trip that starts in 60 BC
Dismiss Oliver Grau's new book as a German multimedia theorist's scholarly treatise on art, and you'll miss a great read. Underneath its staid packaging, Virtual Art: From Illusion to Immersion (MIT Press, $45) puts forth the sort of provocative insights that any Neuromancer fan can appreciate. Grau argues that VR isn't new - it dates back to 60 BC. The author doesn't overplay his hand and claim that medieval muralists were actually building proto-cyberspaces. He just stresses that artists have always used technology to transport us to other realities. To prove the point, he travels through time, highlighting works that created self-contained universes. Take a look.
60 BC
Frescoes covering the walls of Pompeii formed a seamless, immersive environment.
1600s
The trompe l'oeil ceilings of the Nave Sant' Ignazio depicted columns that appeared to reach upward into heaven.
1850s
Stereoscopes, which display vivid 3-D photographs, were de rigueur in middle-class homes.
1883
The 18,568-square-foot Battle of Sedan panorama combined perspective painting techniques and real foreground objects to drop audiences in the center of a brutal and chaotic war zone.
1952
Cinerama and 3-D film went mainstream, adding new dimensions to the big screen. Sensorama came 10 years later.
1992
Head-mounted displays and the Cave Automatic Virtual Environment (which let scientists see, touch, hear, and manipulate data) went into commercial use.
2000
VR turns toward AI: In the onscreen art project Pico_Scan, digital ecosystems are populated with creatures that evolve according to audience data like heights and weights.
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