Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

Review: Oculus Rift

2015; University of California Press; Volume: 74; Issue: 4 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1525/jsah.2015.74.4.526

2150-5926

Ewan Branda,

3D Surveying and Cultural Heritage

Oculus Rift Oculus VR, https://www.oculus.com In 1962, American cinematographer Morton Heilig patented an arcade game that allowed players to fly in a helicopter above the urban landscape or ride on a motorcycle through city streets, all for the price of a game of pinball. Heilig’s machine, the Sensorama, produced immersive simulacra of various urban experiences through the synthesis of film projection and mechanically generated wind, vibration, and odors. While the Sensorama never entered production, its prototype marked the birth of a new type of electromechanical simulation game that by the end of the 1960s would displace the mechanical pinball machine as an arcade staple and pave the way for the fully electronic games of the 1970s. The story of the Sensorama remains one of the founding myths of virtual reality (VR), a loosely defined, multidisciplinary, and, some would say, hubristic area of computer science that emerged between 1960 and the early 1980s. VR proposes that, by way of head-mounted displays and sophisticated input devices, users might inhabit computer-generated three-dimensional worlds with the same degree of “presence” (as it is called in VR) as they inhabit their actual material environments. To the historian or student of architecture, then, VR offers the possibility of exploring a past world as easily and as fully as the present one. The degree to which presence is achieved depends, of course, not only on the sophistication of the technology but also on the user’s desire to accept the experience as real along with the persuasiveness of the rhetoric by which the user’s expectations have been conditioned. Just as it was for Goethe, whose travel accounts contain as many stories of disappointment as of awe, presence depends on the calibration of actual experience to prior expectations. VR made promises it could not always keep. In contrast to computer networks, or even artificial …