ARTC 2010 Section 3 Intro to Digital Arts

Morton Heilig was a cinematographer best known for his imagination concerning virtual reality. It amazes me that he thought up such a concept so early on in the century when computers were only beginning to flourish. He created a device that came pretty close to virtual reality called the Sensorama Simulator. Another one that he invented was the Telesphere mask. Both these devices immersed their patrons into a world that was sensuous beyond anything that had come before.

He interests me, because his inventions look so extravagant that they are almost laughable. However they look so close to anything that we might imagine virtual reality would look like. I’m peaked incredibly by his foresight.

Morton Heilig Died in 1997 at the age of 71. He didn’t pursue virtual reality any farther, because of the high costs of machines made them near impossible to sell. In 1971 he made an award winning film titled “Once”.  Also he wrote many idea books that focused on fantastical ideas. However he fades out of history after his Sensorama failure.

WWII hosted the first computers directing artillery fire with their computations of battlefields etc. Originally computers were a tool used only by the government for narrow purposes: Experiments, Mathematical Informational Tool, Quandary, Etc. Soon they were used to transmit information from one place to another in seconds, and later they were introduced into the art world. However it was the creation of the personal computer that made it a dominant medium in the art world. Many people saw the computer as a fantasy dream world where anything was possible, so they worked at making their wildest dreams come true through it. This view is completely different from the original view of the computer, which was as tool to achieve an end in the real world.