Science Fiction Writers And Virtual Reality (VR)

How Science Fiction Writers Predicted Virtual Reality

Andrew Liptak | July 3, 2016

With the introduction of high-end devices such as the Oculus Rift and the HTC Vive, as well as the simple ones such as Google Cardboard, virtual reality is the next digital frontier. While it’s a world that can now be practically realized, it’s not a new idea: Science fiction has long been imagining virtual worlds within imagined ones.
From the early 1950s, authors had begun to experiment with stories involving simulated worlds. Ray Bradbury’s 1951 story “The Veldt” dealt with a pair of children and a virtual nursery, while Frederik Pohl’s 1955 short story “The Tunnel Under the World” told the story of a man who relived the same day over and over, only to discover that he was trapped in a cruel marketing simulation.

"The first VR film was reportedly the sci-fi western Welcome to Blood City (1977). In the film, five strangers awakened in the countryside with no memory of their past, with only an ID explaining that they were convicted murderers. Sheriff Frendlander (Jack Palance) brought them to the western town of Blood City - where they were forced to either become enslaved, or try to take a top place in society by killing an older unarmed resident. In the film's sci-fi twist, it was soon revealed that they were in a VR game, created by technicians Lyle (John Evans) and Katherine (Samantha Eggar), who were trying to identify their skills and possibly select them as potential elite killers for future combat." Quoted from: http://www.filmsite.org/sci-fifilms6.html. Image Source: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0076909/

<more at http://venturebeat.com/2016/07/03/how-science-fiction-writers-predicted-virtual-reality/; related articles and links: http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2016/03/virtual-reality-is-just-television-for-the-computer-junkie/475632/ (Dystopian Virtual Reality Is Finally Here. And it’s stranger than science fiction. March 28, 2016) and http://www.rpi.edu/dept/emac/scifi-vr/Syllabus/ (Science Fiction Virtual Reality. Syllabus. Fall 1996)>