It’s been almost 30 years since the computer scientist Jaron Lanier formed VPL Research, the first company to sell the high-tech goggles and gloves that once defined humanity’s concept of where technology might soon take our species. In the late 1980s, a person could pull on a $100,000 head-mounted display and electronic gauntlet and fool their brain into thinking he’d stepped inside the simulated space rendered on the screen.
Image: Future gazing: VPL Research demonstrated its EyePhone virtual reality system at the Texpo Telecommunications Show, in San Francisco, in 1989.
