MAD Magazine, June 1954:
DDD (3D) COMICS DEPT: By now you are familiar with 3-D Comic Books! You Know that some 3-D books enclose One set of 3-D glasses… You know some 3-D Books enclose Two sets of 3-D glasses! We are proud to announce that we of Mad are enclosing No sets of 3-D glasses for this, our first Mad story in… 3-DIMENSIONS!
(click on Super-Mickey to view original article)
At the risk of overstepping any and all boundaries of propriety, here are complete do-it-yourself build instructions for an “incredible” haptic feedback interface for your Atari console. With a bit of soldering and epoxy, you can add force feedback into any Atari console game, everyone’s a winner, come one, come all. First check out the demo video, then follow these step by step build instructions. Don’t forget anything from the parts list, especially the tissues.
Harvey Newquist tires of waiting for the New York Post headline to scream: “Wife Dumps Husband For Cybersex Lover” or “Computer Casanova Seduces Virtual Valerie.”
Money quote:
Does the average person get to see or use any of this stuff? Can you go any place just experience the joys of VR? Is Ronald Reagan in full control of his senses? The answer to all these questions is an emphatic “no.” … Try asking your next-door neighbor about VR. Ask him or her about their most recent VR experience.
Has anything changed in the 15 years since this 1996 article was published in the Virtual Reality Special Report?
From 1993: “Now you can go to Radio Shack, buy what you need, and build it yourself.” Robert Suding and the Virtual Reality Special Report provide specific instructions for building a stereoscopic HMD for $435. Interestingly the optics and prisms are quite similar to the V-Rtifacts “Leep On The Cheap” design.
“Inside Jaron Lanier is a precocious eight-year-old who got together with some friends and built a spaceship,” wrote Howard Rheingold in his 1991 book, Virtual Reality, the definitive history of VR to date. “Now he wants us all to take a ride in it.”
VR pioneer, Mark Pesce discusses the relationship between Virtual Reality and psychedelic substances.
MAPS: Do you ever use psychedelics for problem-solving tasks? Where you have a specific question in mind, and then you take psychedelics in search of an answer?
Mark: They’ve certainly been facilitators or catalysts for that. The most striking example is all the cyberspace protocols that came to me. I mean “wham,” it came to me like that, and I just saw them. I got the big picture, but the big picture said, “Okay, well you know roughly how to make it work. Now you have to go in and do the detail, right?” I spent three years doing that detail work, and out of that detail work came VMRL, and some stuff which you’ll probably still see in a couple of years. So in that case it was very direct… I’ve done a bunch of research work on the ethics and the effects of virtual environments. And that also was catalyzed specifically in a psychedelic experience. You know, it was like “snap.” It’s a moment of clarity.
