49 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 calls its hero Hiro Protagonist and pictures the Metaverse as one Street circling a black planet; in 2021 the coinage gave Facebook its new name, Meta Platforms.

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 co-founded VPL Research in the mid-1980s, the first company to sell VR goggles and wired gloves; despite the head start it filed for bankruptcy in 1990, and Sun Microsystems later bought all its patents.

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 raised nearly ten times its $250,000 goal for the Rift in 2012 on which crowdfunding site?

Kickstarter backers pledged about $2.4 million, and in 2016 Oculus thanked them: everyone who had pledged $275 or more, roughly 7,500 people, was sent 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 sets out to seize a Combine superweapon, five years before Half-Life 2; it was the first Half-Life game since Episode Two left the story on a cliffhanger in 2007.

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, the name of a real sensor sensitive enough to detect extremely weak magnetic fields; in the film it records sensations straight from the wearer's cerebral cortex.

Which 1982 film's villain, the Master Control Program, began life as a humble chess program?

Tron's Master Control Program was written as a chess program by Dr. Walter Gibbs, then annexed by executive Ed Dillinger and left to grow into a tyrant; David Warner, who played Dillinger, voiced it uncredited.

Sensory conflict theory blames VR sickness on the eyes disagreeing with which organ?

The inner ear tells the brain the body is sitting still while the eyes report running and jumping, and the clash brings on nausea; graphics that lag behind a head turn can set off the same quarrel.

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

Boeing gave the term its first job: Caudell coined it in 1990 while designing a display to help workers visualise an aircraft's intricate systems, and BMW and Volkswagen later put AR on their own assembly lines.

The CAVE, a VR room named partly for Plato's allegory, shows its 3D imagery where?

On its walls and floor: projectors surround viewers in 3D glasses with the scene, and sensors follow the wearer's head and redraw it, so they can walk around objects that seem to hang in mid-air.

The Virtuality arcade pods of 1991, with their headsets and multiplayer deathmatches, 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?

Moves is the word the tagline turns on, 'Time Moves Only When You Move': stand still and bullets all but hang in the air, so every dodge can be planned; the VR version was rebuilt with its own set of levels.

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 who is offered a royal pardon for finding what is enraging the machines; it launched with the headset in February 2023.

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.

Adding which ability turns a three-degrees-of-freedom headset into a six-degrees-of-freedom one?

Tracking position in space adds moving forward, sideways and up to the three rotations of pitch, yaw and roll, so a wearer can lean and walk; the 2019 Oculus Quest could do it and the Oculus Go could 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.

Which author coined the word 'cyberspace' in his 1982 short story Burning Chrome?

William Gibson later admitted he chose 'cyberspace' because it sounded like an effective buzzword, 'evocative and essentially meaningless'; his 1984 novel Neuromancer carried it into everyday speech.

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; in October 2022 a tracker counted as few as 38 users transacting in a day, a figure the platform disputed with a claim of 8,000 daily visitors.

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

ZeniMax Media won its award in early 2017 even though the jury found no stolen trade secrets, only a broken non-disclosure agreement and copyright breaches; a judge later halved the sum and the two sides settled in 2018.

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

John Carmack borrowed one of Palmer Luckey's prototypes and called it by far the most immersive headset he had used; in 2013 he quit id Software to be Oculus's full-time CTO, leaving in 2022 to work on AGI.

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

Anduril Industries first tested its camera towers on a Texas rancher's land in 2018, and by 2020 US border authorities planned to install 200 of them; Luckey says Facebook fired him in 2017 for his politics, which it denies.

Mattel's 1989 Power Glove for the NES was a cut-price cousin of which VPL Research glove?

The DataGlove was VPL's high-end model, reading finger bends with optical fibres; Mattel's toy version used cheaper sensors, became a hit gift for Christmas 1989 and proved all but useless for most NES games.

A red-LED scanning eyepiece licensed from Massachusetts firm Reflection Technology became which 1995 console?

Virtual Boy sweeps one column of 224 red LEDs across each eye with an oscillating mirror; Gunpei Yokoi kept red because those LEDs were cheapest and gave a perfect black, yet the console became one of Nintendo's rare flops.

Which Chinese phone maker co-built the 2018 Oculus Go and sold its own version of the headset in China?

Xiaomi launched its twin, the Mi VR Standalone, in China a month after the Go in 2018; both ran on a phone chip, the Snapdragon 821, yet needed no phone or PC, then a brand-new category of headset.

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 '20 percent time' as a way to make VR cheap; an early prototype so impressed colleagues that Google handed a viewer to every attendee at its I/O conference in 2014.

Which 1939 3D-picture toy brand did Mattel relaunch in 2015 as a Google Cardboard-compatible VR viewer?

View-Master was unveiled at the 1939 New York World's Fair as a 3D alternative to the scenic postcard, each reel carrying seven image pairs; 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.

Ivan Sutherland's 1968 head-mounted display rig was nicknamed after whose sword?

Damocles lent his name as a joke: the rig's mechanical arm hung from the lab ceiling over the wearer's head, following each movement so the picture could shift as they looked around.

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

Aspen Movie Map was filmed by four gyro-stabilised cameras on a car roof, firing every ten feet, with ARPA money; stored on laserdisc, it let users drive the streets or switch to a polygon model of the town.

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

Project Cambria became the $1,499 Quest Pro, aimed at business users with eye and face tracking and slim pancake lenses; Meta discontinued it in 2024, less than two years after its October 2022 launch.

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

ByteDance, the owner of TikTok, bought Pico, then the world's third-largest headset maker, two months before Facebook renamed itself Meta, lining two social-media rivals up against each other in VR.

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 rings are what the station is there to mine; players are its service android Jack in the year 2126, moving by grabbing surfaces and pushing off, an idea taken from footage of astronauts aboard the International Space Station.

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

VRChat players took a squat Knuckles avatar from YouTuber Gregzilla's review and paired it with lines from the Ugandan action film Who Killed Captain Alex?, asking strangers in chorus whether they 'know the way'.

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 by $100 and made the Quest 2 the cheap way into VR; when Meta retired it in September 2024, its replacement, the Quest 3S, launched 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, founded in 2016 by former Nokia and Microsoft executives who aimed past the consumer market at headsets sharp enough for professional simulators.

Google's Daydream View headset of 2016 stood out by being wrapped in what soft, lightweight material?

Fabric made the Daydream View smaller and lighter than rivals such as the Gear VR, but the phone-powered platform never caught on: in 2019 Google stopped selling the headset and said it would certify no new Daydream phones.