Probably my favorite virtual reality experience was unearthed around 1863 in the Roman suburb of Prima Porta. Well, it’s not a virtual reality experience as much as it’s an illusionistic fresco on four walls, but bear with me. In the villa of Livia Drusilla (58 BCE-29 CE), the wife of the first emperor of Rome, there is a chilly, underground room designed as a simulatory visual experience. It’s a lush garden. Firs, turkey oaks, palm, myrtles and pomegranate trees, some exotic to Rome, dot the landscape, all in stunning perspective. To the Romans, the painting was reportedly transportative.

Everywhere you look, the garden appears to bend to your point of view and re-form around you. The walls are windowless, contributing to the caprice. In 25 BCE, when Livia’s Garden Room was designed, the fresco was a cutting-edge, immersive technology.

“Virtual reality” has been around since the ‘80s, according to most accounts. Essentially, that’s just a marker of when computer scientist Jaron Lanier coined the term. Previous head-mounted devices (HMDs) included the Aspen Movie Map (1978), a simulation of the eponymous Colorado town, and the Sword of Damocles (1965), graphical artist Ivan Sutherland’s 3D binocular display device, which boasted head-tracking. Sutherland named the device after the Roman orator Cicero’s story about the Ancient Greek courtier Damocles, who when we tried out the tyrant Dionysius’ throne, was warned by an enormous, hanging sword above him of the volatility of power.

Bits of the outside worked leaked into the Sword of Damocles’ view, a flaw that the designers of Livia’s villa avoided. Read More

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