- Morton L. Heilig, the “father of virtual reality,” created the first-ever VR machine called Sensorama, a booth that can accommodate up to four adults.
- Heilig’s multi-sensory Sensorama gives us a glimpse into the future of cinema, using a variety of technologies to simulate all human senses, with the booth exposing participants to full-color three-dimensional video and audio, as well as smells, vibrations and various atmospheric influences such as wind.
- Morton Heilig also patented an invention in 1960 called the Telesphere Mask, the first ever head-mounted display device, or HDM. His mask provided the wearer with 3D stereoscopic images and full stereo sound, which was simple and effective. But there’s no motion tracking yet.
Virtual reality is older than you think
When we talk about the history of virtual reality, we’re usually referring to the promise of the eighties: the sci-fi movies and experimental products that made us believe in virtual worlds in the first place.
Going from there to here may seem like an eternity in terms of VR development, but in fact there have been VR products available as far back as the 1950s. One of the earliest works is still working today.
To call Morton Heilig a visionary is to grossly underestimate his talent. At a time when most people still had black and white TVS, he hand-crafted a fully functional 3D video machine that allowed you to ride a virtual motorcycle while experiencing the sounds, winds, vibrations and even smells of being on the road. He called it the Sensorama simulator, but it failed.
An invention too far ahead of its time
What Heilig built was so ahead of its time that generations disliked his swimming pool, hidden under a tarpaulin. His wife, Marianne Heilig, who had worked with him on many inventions, took on huge debts to fund his ideas-so much so that she was still paying them off nearly two decades after his death. So who is the husband many call the father of virtual reality? She’s not the only one. An accomplished cinematographer, Heilig created Sensorama out of a desire to build the “cinema of the future.” But 3D films required 3D films, which were not readily available in the late 1950s.
“He calls himself a Renaissance man,” Marianne told techradar, “because he has so many different talents.” When he took me to the apartment where he had the machine, I kind of oozed and aahed – but I didn’t understand the significance of it at the time.
So Heilig invented a 3D camera and projector in addition to his observation machine, and made five movies to show what Sensorama could do. These are mostly experiences based on passive riding: helicopters, go-kart, bicycles and motorcycles.
Despite the lack of user control, these films still feel authentic: Howard Rheingold tried the still-working Sensorama in the eighties and commented that “motorcycle drivers are reckless, which makes me very uncomfortable, which makes me very happy.”
The fifth film was a hit with investors, and Heilig joked about it: It was a scruffy film starring a New York belly dancer. Rheingold noted that Sensorama sprays cheap perfume whenever she gets near the camera, while the cymbals on her fingers can be heard in the appropriate ears. As adult video in virtual reality took off in 2016, Heilig seemed to know what people wanted before they wanted it.
Selling the future
Morton Heilig clearly saw the commercial potential of his invention, painstakingly detailing the potential uses and benefits in his 1962 patent application. The inventor envisions his machine being used to train armed forces, industrial workers and students, explaining that “today there is a growing need for ways and means of teaching and training individuals without actually exposing individuals to the possible dangers of specific situations.”
Taking the supersonic jet as an example, Heilig commented that actually flying a jet would be a better learning experience for students than just hearing about it, but “impossible or dangerous,” so his invention could better understand the situation without putting anyone at risk.
“If a student is able to experience a situation or an idea as if it were everyday life, then he has shown that he understands it better and faster, and if a student understands it better and faster, he is drawn to the subject with greater pleasure and enthusiasm.”
“What a student learns this way, he keeps for a longer period of time,” the patent continued – almost as if Heilig hoped to sell the machine directly from the filing.
In fact, the Sensorama was marketed through flyers to major companies including Ford and International Harvesters in what was described as a revolutionary new showroom display. Heilig once again predicted the future: Many companies are now using VR as a way to showcase their products and experiences.
But in the fifties, the company wasn’t ready, and Sensorama failed to get enough investment or sales.
Another way to get rich is to use it as an arcade. Universal Studios installed a coin-operated unit, Marianne recalls, “and the dorms that people put in made a lot of money, but the management at Universal Studios at the time thought it was too much for a family business, so we had to take it out and put it on the dock.” It’s on the Santa Monica Pier, in Times Square, everywhere. It’s a nice little ATM, I tell you!
But a quarter of that money wasn’t enough to sustain an invention that cost a lot of money to produce, so Heilig sought investors. Powerful investors did eventually invest in themselves, but “Mort just couldn’t get it to work” – the machine was made of many parts he had created himself, and wasn’t particularly sturdy: when it was put into the arcade, it broke down quickly.
For the visionary Heilig, this kind of business failure is not the first. Before the ill-fated Sensorama, he applied for this obscure invention, which looks so familiar it’s hard to believe it was created more than half a century ago.
Unrecognised genius
Most articles about the birth of virtual reality have identified the Sword of Damocles in 1968 as the first ever head-mounted VR display. But, as you might have guessed by now, something similar happened to Morton Heilig exactly eight years ago. The Telesphere Mask, which he patented in 1960, looks so modern in the patent drawings that you could forgive it for being an early Gear VR.
Described by Heilig in his application as a “retractable TV device for personal use,” the Telesphere is in every way the 3D video headset we’re used to – except instead of connecting to a smartphone or PC, Heilig uses a miniature TV tube. “The viewer is given a complete sense of reality, namely a moving three-dimensional image, possibly in color, with 100% peripheral vision, binaural sounds, smells, and breezes,” the patent application reads. And it’s still light enough to wear on your head, with adjustable ear and eye fixtures. Some modern headsets can’t do this, which was created at a time when it wasn’t even certain that the TV feed was in color.
Again, Telesphere was a commercial failure, though it may comfort Morton to know that a similar digital product launched on Kickstarter 55 years later didn’t even raise half of its $50,000 funding goal.
So what happened to one of the first head-mounted displays in history? Is it on display at the Smithsonian, or does it have a place in Mark Zuckerberg’s collection?
“I put it in a wooden box,” Marianne Heilig said. Despondently, she explains how she went to the Hollywood Museum herself (no giant Sensorama machine – “it was only the size of a vending machine”) to try to make management aware of its importance. She was told they wouldn’t even accept it for free.
Virtual reality is almost certainly not the only development Heilig predicts, but we may never know about the others.
“I have 52 spiral notebooks full of his inventions, and lots of folders,” Marianne says. “From ordinary things to very imaginative and otherworldly things.” But the drawings were not found in Marianne’s home, which she claims to have tidied up for fear of a leaking roof.
Incredibly, even in 2016, when the world had already woken up to the potential of virtual reality and the prescience of Heilig machines, these drawings and prototypes were not selling for millions of dollars.
We’re not all in galleries watching his sketches or buying tickets to “Sensorama: Morton Heilig Story” (in 3D, of course), which seems crazy when you hear the reaction to the machine ahead of its time.
But, many times, true genius is rarely recognised until it’s too late. Let’s just hope that while Heilig claims to be the Da Vinci of VR, our other inventions haven’t been lost to a leaky roof.
