The article's subtitle calls Lanier the "visionary behind virtual reality" and tempers that slightly in the body text calling him "...a pioneer and publicizer of virtual-reality technology..." and stating "...he helped make virtual reality a reality..."
Yet most of the Timeline section of Wikipedia's entry for VR predates Lanier. [1]
From the article:
> Lanier is still in the game in part because virtual reality has become, virtually, reality these days. "If you look out the window," he says pointing to the traffic flowing around Union Square, "there’s no vehicle that wasn’t designed in a virtual-reality system first. And every vehicle of every kind built—plane, train—is first put in a virtual-reality machine and people experience driving it [as if it were real] first."
No, they were designed in a Computer-aided design (CAD) system first. The 20 year history of CAD prior to 1985 is omitted and CAD is subsumed into VR.
Automakers were leading users of high-end graphics systems and CAD prior to Lanier's involvement:
> ...probably the most important work on polynomial curves and sculptured surface was done by Pierre Bézier (Renault), Paul de Casteljau (Citroen), Steven Anson Coons (MIT, Ford), James Ferguson (Boeing), Carl de Boor (GM), Birkhoff (GM) and Garibedian (GM) in the 1960s and W. Gordon (GM) and R. Riesenfeld in the 1970s. [2]
Designs are now tested with VR, but that's really just an extension of the CAD process.
Another issue is that navigating through virtual 3D environments was being done long before 1985 in the form of high-end flight simulators delivered to the military [3] and projects such as the Aspen Movie Map. [4] First person games existed but were severely limited by the capability of the hardware of the time. [5]
Yet most of the Timeline section of Wikipedia's entry for VR predates Lanier. [1]
From the article:
> Lanier is still in the game in part because virtual reality has become, virtually, reality these days. "If you look out the window," he says pointing to the traffic flowing around Union Square, "there’s no vehicle that wasn’t designed in a virtual-reality system first. And every vehicle of every kind built—plane, train—is first put in a virtual-reality machine and people experience driving it [as if it were real] first."
No, they were designed in a Computer-aided design (CAD) system first. The 20 year history of CAD prior to 1985 is omitted and CAD is subsumed into VR.
Automakers were leading users of high-end graphics systems and CAD prior to Lanier's involvement:
> ...probably the most important work on polynomial curves and sculptured surface was done by Pierre Bézier (Renault), Paul de Casteljau (Citroen), Steven Anson Coons (MIT, Ford), James Ferguson (Boeing), Carl de Boor (GM), Birkhoff (GM) and Garibedian (GM) in the 1960s and W. Gordon (GM) and R. Riesenfeld in the 1970s. [2]
Designs are now tested with VR, but that's really just an extension of the CAD process.
Another issue is that navigating through virtual 3D environments was being done long before 1985 in the form of high-end flight simulators delivered to the military [3] and projects such as the Aspen Movie Map. [4] First person games existed but were severely limited by the capability of the hardware of the time. [5]
Head-mounted displays also predate 1985. [6]
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virtual_reality#Timeline [2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer-aided_design#History [3] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flight_simulator#Computing_in_f... [4] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aspen_Movie_Map [5] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_person_%28video_games%29#... [6] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helmet_mounted_display#History