50 Fun Facts About Virtual Reality

Which country opened the first embassy inside the virtual world Second Life, on its Diplomacy Island?

The Maldives beat Sweden to it: the Maldives' embassy on Diplomacy Island let visitors quiz a computer-generated ambassador about visas and trade. Sweden's Swedish Institute opened the second in May 2007.

The word 'metaverse' was coined in which 1992 novel, whose hacker hero delivers pizza for the Mafia?

Snow Crash author Neal Stephenson named that hero Hiro Protagonist, and his Metaverse is a single Street running around a featureless black planet. Stephenson meant it as a successor to the Internet.

Which author sued to have his name removed from the 1992 VR film The Lawnmower Man?

Stephen King's 1975 story was about a Pan-worshipping satyr who mows lawns, nothing like the film, and New Line kept his name on the video box anyway. The picture had been marketed as Stephen King's The Lawnmower Man.

The Quest 2 headset launched in 2020 requiring users to log in with what, a rule dropped after a backlash?

A Facebook account was mandatory until Meta's 2022 'Meta account' system let owners unhook their headsets from Facebook logins. Some users had found their headsets unusable after their Facebook account was suspended.

Apple's Vision Pro launched without handheld controllers; a wearer selects an item by looking at it and doing what?

Pinching two fingers together is the click: dragging the pinched fingers drags a window and flicking the wrist scrolls. An outward screen called EyeSight shows the wearer's eyes to bystanders.

Morton Heilig's Sensorama of 1962 blew wind and city smells at viewers riding what through New York?

A motorcycle ride through New York came with fan-made wind and the noise and smell of the street, one of five short films Heilig made for the machine. He patented it in 1962 but never found the money to go further.

Which VPL Research founder popularised the term 'virtual reality' in the late 1980s while selling the first VR gloves?

Jaron Lanier founded VPL Research in 1984, the first company to sell VR goggles and wired gloves; its EyePhone headset and Data Suit later appeared on screen in The Lawnmower Man. VPL went bankrupt in 1990.

Beat Saber, the rhythm game of slicing neon blocks with two sabers, comes from a studio based in which city?

Prague studio Beat Games was bought by Oculus's parent company in November 2019 and kept operating there under Oculus Studios. Czech composer Jaroslav Beck talked his way into writing the soundtrack after seeing early prototypes.

Sega's official reason for scrapping its never-released Genesis headset, Sega VR, was that the effect was too what?

Too realistic, Sega said, so players might move about and hurt themselves; Sega of America boss Tom Kalinske instead blamed reports of motion sickness and severe headaches. At least four games were in progress when it died.

Which game company partnered with HTC on the Vive headset, whose base stations sweep rooms with infrared lasers?

Valve's base stations are nicknamed 'lighthouses' because their spinning lasers sweep the play area with timed pulses that the headset and wand controllers use to fix their position. The consumer Vive shipped in April 2016.

Oculus's 2012 Rift Kickstarter, whose $300 reward tier was the DK1 developer kit, reached what share of its target?

974% of the target meant $2.4 million raised, and Palmer Luckey had built his first prototype at 17 in his parents' garage. Backers who pledged $275 or more were later gifted a free consumer Rift.

Half-Life: Alyx, the 2020 VR prequel, sends Alyx Vance against the Combine in which occupied location?

City 17 is where Alyx seizes a Combine superweapon five years before Half-Life 2, ending a 13-year wait since Episode Two's 2007 cliffhanger. It won Best VR/AR at the 2020 Game Awards.

In Kathryn Bigelow's Strange Days (1995), black-market clips of other people's memories are recorded by which device?

SQUID stands for Superconducting Quantum Interference Device, recording sensations straight from the wearer's cerebral cortex onto MiniDisc-like clips. It grossed just $17 million against a $42 million budget.

In Tron (1982), ENCOM's rogue Master Control Program began its existence as software for playing what?

Chess was the MCP's origin: Dr. Walter Gibbs wrote it, executive Ed Dillinger annexed it, and it grew into the rogue system that beams Kevin Flynn into the mainframe. David Warner voiced it uncredited while also playing Dillinger.

Which motion-sickness theory blames VR nausea on the eyes and inner ear sending clashing reports of movement?

Sensory conflict between the visual, vestibular and proprioceptive senses is the standard account; the rival postural instability idea blames poor posture adaptation. Neural mismatch adds that conflict alone is not enough.

The term 'augmented reality' is attributed to researcher Thomas Caudell, who worked in 1990 for which aircraft maker?

Boeing was later joined by BMW and Volkswagen in putting AR on assembly lines to track process improvements. The earliest working AR systems followed in the early 1990s, starting with the Virtual Fixtures project.

The CAVE, a room whose walls are rear-projected with 3D imagery, takes its name partly from an allegory by whom?

Plato's allegory of the cave in the Republic is the second meaning; the acronym itself is Cave Automatic Virtual Environment, invented by Carolina Cruz-Neira, Daniel Sandin and Thomas DeFanti at the University of Illinois Chicago in 1992.

The 1991 Virtuality arcade pods, the first mass-produced networked VR machines, came from which country?

United Kingdom firm W Industries grew out of Jonathan Waldern's research at Leicester Polytechnic; its signature game Dactyl Nightmare had a pterodactyl swoop down and snatch players mid-deathmatch. Each pod ran on an Amiga 3000.

In the shooter Superhot, a VR showpiece, time advances only when the player does what?

'Time Moves Only When You Move' is the tagline, and the slowdown led critics to call Superhot the 'Braid of first-person shooters'. The rebuilt Superhot VR shipped for the Rift, Vive and Sony's headset.

Gorilla Tag's avatars, officially nicknamed 'monkes', are gorillas missing which body part?

Legs are missing: creator Kerestell 'Lemming' Smith's arm-pushing locomotion reminded a friend of a gorilla, so the avatars became legless 'monkes'. It went into early access on Quest and SteamVR in 2021.

In the 2018 VR adventure Moss, the player watches over a tiny hero named Quill, who is what kind of animal?

A mouse named Quill sets out to rescue her uncle from the fire-breathing snake Sarffog, with the player cast as a giant 'Reader' turning the pages of her storybook. Developer Polyarc followed it with Moss: Book II in 2022.

Job Simulator, bundled with the HTC Vive at its 2016 launch, is set in a job museum run by what?

Robots with monitor faces, floating CRTs, run the museum of the '2050 Archives' where humans relive old jobs; Owlchemy Labs said it was only the second made-for-VR title to pass a million copies.

Guerrilla Games and Firesprite co-developed which PS VR2 launch exclusive, set in the world of Aloy?

Horizon Call of the Mountain casts not Aloy but Ryas, a disgraced former Shadow Carja soldier seeking a royal pardon, and shipped with the headset on 22 February 2023. Sony sold slightly under 600,000 PS VR2 units in its first six weeks.

Which technique, enabled by eye tracking in PS VR2 and Vision Pro, draws full detail only where the wearer is looking?

Foveated rendering copies the eye's fovea, sharp at the gaze point and cheap in the periphery; a 'fixed' variant skips eye tracking and just assumes you look at the centre. Vive Pro Eye and Quest Pro use it too.

A headset tracking only head rotation, not movement across the room, is said to have how many degrees of freedom?

Three degrees of freedom covers pitch, yaw and roll, nodding 'yes', shaking 'no' and bobbling side to side; adding position in space makes six, which the 2019 Oculus Quest had and the Oculus Go did not.

Which artefact, named after a household fixture, describes the visible grid of gaps between pixels in early headsets?

Screen-door effect describes the fine black lines between pixels, like looking through the mesh of an insect screen, which is why headset makers chase ever higher pixel density. Projectors show it too at low resolutions.

William Gibson coined 'cyberspace' in which 1982 short story, two years before his novel Neuromancer?

Burning Chrome described cyberspace as the 'mass consensual hallucination' of computer networks, a phrase Neuromancer turned into the furniture of cyberpunk along with 'the matrix' and 'jacking in'.

Which landmark stood behind Mark Zuckerberg's mocked 2022 avatar selfie, posted for a social-VR launch in France?

The Eiffel Tower and Spain's Sagrada Família were rendered so crudely that Twitter compared the image unfavourably with Second Life and Twisted Metal. The post announced Meta's social VR app's arrival in France and Spain on 16 August 2022.

Which Ethereum-based virtual world saw a plot of its land sell for nearly $2.5 million in November 2021?

Decentraland parcels had sold for about $20 at its 2017 launch, paid in its MANA token; by 2023 The Verge reported as few as 38 daily users, a figure the platform disputed with a claim of around 8,000.

Which publisher won a $500 million jury verdict against Oculus in 2017, claiming code in the Rift was its property?

ZeniMax Media argued that code its former id Software staff contributed to the Rift was its property; a jury agreed in February 2017 and the parent company plus some Oculus officers were ordered to pay.

Which id Software co-founder showed Doom 3 on a Rift prototype at E3 2012 and became Oculus CTO in 2013?

John Carmack had asked for the prototype's head tracker firmware to run at 250 Hz instead of 125 Hz, and in November 2013 he quit id Software to be Oculus's full-time CTO. He left in 2022 for an AGI startup, Keen Technologies.

Which defence firm, builder of autonomous border sentry towers, did Oculus founder Palmer Luckey co-found in 2017?

Anduril Industries won a $1 billion contract in 2022 to lead counter-drone work for US Special Operations Command; hundreds of its Sentry Towers stand on the southern border. Luckey's March 2017 exit from Oculus's parent went unexplained.

Mattel's 1989 Power Glove for the NES was licensed from which $10,000 VPL Research glove?

The DataGlove cost $10,000 against the Power Glove's $90, and 1.3 million Power Gloves sold in the 1989 holiday rush before buyers found it barely worked with NES games. Both grew from Thomas Zimmerman's instrumented glove.

Which Massachusetts firm licensed Nintendo the red-LED scanning eyepiece behind the Virtual Boy?

Reflection Technology's Scanned Linear Array scans a single column of 224 red LEDs across the eye with an oscillating mirror, and the firm was reportedly left 'devastated' when the Virtual Boy flopped.

Which Chinese phone maker co-built the 2018 Oculus Go and sold its own version as the Mi VR Standalone?

Xiaomi launched the Mi VR Standalone in China on 31 May 2018, a month after the Go; both ran a Qualcomm Snapdragon 821 and needed no phone or PC. The Go was unveiled at Oculus Connect in October 2017 and later discontinued.

Google Cardboard began as a 20% side project by two engineers at the Google Cultural Institute in which city?

Paris engineers David Coz and Damien Henry built it in their 'Innovation Time Off'; Google then handed a viewer to every attendee at I/O 2014 and had shipped 15 million by November 2019. Volvo gave away branded goggles in November 2014.

Which 1939 stereoscopic toy brand did Mattel relaunch in 2015 as a Google Cardboard-compatible VR viewer?

View-Master reels hold seven stereo pairs on a thin cardboard disc, and the brand was introduced at the 1939 New York World's Fair marked 'Patent Applied For'. Mattel announced the VR version with Google in February 2015.

Which optical device, presented by Sir Charles Wheatstone in 1838, is counted among the precursors of VR?

The stereoscope shows each eye a slightly different picture so the brain fuses them into depth, the same trick every headset's lens pair still plays. Wheatstone presented his findings on 21 June 1838.

Which French playwright wrote of theatre's 'la réalité virtuelle' in his 1938 collection The Theatre and Its Double?

Antonin Artaud used the phrase for the illusory nature of characters and objects on stage, half a century before headsets gave the words a new meaning. Le Théâtre et son double is the collection's French title.

Which Colorado town did MIT's 1978 laserdisc 'Movie Map' let users drive through, decades before Street View?

Aspen Movie Map was shot from a camera car with ARPA money and stored on laserdisc, one segment per view per city block, letting users roam Aspen in summer, winter or as polygons. Andrew Lippman led the team under Nicholas Negroponte.

Scott Fisher's VIEW project of 1985–90, pairing goggles with a wired glove for telerobotics, ran at which NASA site?

Ames Research Center's Virtual Environment Workstation produced the gloves-and-goggles image of VR, along with head-coupled displays and 3D audio. Fisher had earlier worked at Atari Research Labs and MIT's Architecture Machine Group.

Meta's 2022 Quest Pro, with eye and face tracking aimed at business users, was developed under which codename?

Project Cambria was announced by Zuckerberg as a high-end mixed-reality headset with colour passthrough, depth sensors and eye tracking; it shipped on 25 October 2022 with pancake lenses.

Which Chinese company bought the VR headset maker Pico in August 2021?

ByteDance picked up Pico, described as an Oculus-like startup, in the same year Zuckerberg's company renamed itself Meta to chase the metaverse; that October, Meta pledged $10 billion over the following year to Reality Labs.

Brainstorm (1983), about a headset that records and replays people's experiences, was the final film of which actress?

Natalie Wood died by drowning during a production break in November 1981 and the film was nearly abandoned; director Douglas Trumbull completed it for a 1983 release. Its plot turns on a researcher recording her own fatal heart attack.

Resident Evil 7's virtual reality mode was exclusive for its first 12 months to which headset?

PlayStation VR owners could play Resident Evil 7 in the headset from its January 2017 launch, and Capcom's new RE Engine was built with VR development tools. The game's first-person view was itself a first for a numbered entry.

Lone Echo (2017) has players push through zero gravity aboard a mining station orbiting which planet?

Saturn's Kronos II station is home to the android Jack in the year 2126, and players move by grabbing the environment and pushing off; Ready At Dawn prototyped it while finishing The Order: 1886.

Which social VR platform spawned the 'Ugandan Knuckles' meme of players in crude Sonic-character avatars?

VRChat's meme took its look from a YouTube review and lines from the Ugandan film Who Killed Captain Alex?; Polygon called it 'blatantly racist'. VRChat had launched for the Rift DK1 in January 2014.

The Quest 2 launched in October 2020 with its 64 GB model priced at what, $100 below the first Quest?

$299 undercut the original Quest, and Meta cut the 128 GB Quest 2 back to $299 when the Quest 3 arrived at $499 in 2023. The Quest 2 was discontinued in September 2024 in favour of the Quest 3S at the same price.

Varjo, maker of ultra-high-resolution headsets for demanding simulation training, was founded in 2016 in which country?

Finland's capital Helsinki is home to Varjo, started by four founders in 2016 to build devices with clarity beyond anything sold to consumers. Its fourth-generation XR-4 headsets were announced in 2023.

Google's Daydream VR platform, launched in 2016 with a foam-and-fabric View headset, was discontinued in which year?

2019 was when Google said the Daydream View was discontinued and it would certify no new Daydream phones; HBO had already pulled its Daydream apps that year. The platform had been built into Android Nougat in 2016.