Three-dimensional films remained an experimental novelty into the 1930s, but the idea of totally immersive entertainment had entered the public consciousness, and people had begun to imagine future applications of 3-D technology. In 1935, the pulp science fiction magazine Wonder Stories published a story called “Pygmalion’s Spectacles,” written by American author Stanley G. Weinbaum, that describes a system that looks and functions very much like what we now know as virtual reality.
In the story, businessman Dan Burke meets an eccentric professor who has invented a headset that can make a movie “very real indeed . . . a movie that gives one sight and sound . . . so that you are in the story, you speak to the shadows, and the shadows reply, and instead of being on a screen, the story is all about you, and you are in it.” When Burke tries the invention—a device “vaguely reminiscent of a gas mask,” with goggles and a rubber mouthpiece—he is transported from a New York City hotel room to an unearthly, beautiful forest, a place called Paracosma, or “Land Beyond the World,” where he meets and falls in love with an elfin woman named Galatea. After he spends what feels like days in the sylvan paradise, it fades away to reveal that he’s spent five hours sitting in a chair watching a prerecorded first-person movie. Later, the scientist explains how he pulled off the illusion:
“The trees were club-mosses enlarged by a lens . . . All was trick photography, but stereoscopic, as I told you—three dimensional. The fruits were rubber; the house is a summer building on our campus—Northern University. And the voice was mine; you didn’t speak at all, except your name at the first, and I left a blank for that. I played your part, you see; I went around with the photographic apparatus strapped on my head, to keep the viewpoint always that of the observer. See?” He grinned wryly. “Luckily I’m rather short, or you’d have seemed a giant.”
“Wait a minute!” said Dan, his mind whirling. “You say you played my part. Then Galatea—is she real too?”
“Tea’s real enough,” said the Professor. “My niece, a senior at Northern, and likes dramatics. She helped me out with the thing. Why? Want to meet her?”
Weinbaum wasn’t just the first to describe a virtual reality system, he was the first to illustrate how its artificial world could be more compelling than the real one—that people might get lost in the fantasy, lose track of time and place, even fall in love with a virtual character. And that kind of narrative power was too tempting to be abandoned. In December 1935, Hollywood studio Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer released Audioscopiks, an anaglyphic 3-D movie viewed using cardboard spectacles with red and green lenses.
“Seeking a novelty to charm its fickle audiences, the company has revived the stereoscopic film,” an article in The New York Times reported. “Metro appears to be fairly enthusiastic about its possibilities . . . the company is having 3,000,000 of the pasteboard ‘eye glasses’ made up at a cost, confidentially, of $3.25 per thousand.”
The eight-minute film was little more than a demo reel for 3-D technology. It starts with a brief explanation of how stereoscopy works and what to expect from the movie (“You’ve heard talking pictures and you’ve seen pictures in color,” a narrator intones. “Now for the first time we combine sound and color with third-dimensional pictures!”), before instructing the audience how to put on their glasses and launching into a series of short scenes where objects seem to leap out of the screen toward the viewer—a ladder poking through a window, a baseball player throwing a pitch, a man spraying water from a seltzer bottle. Critics were impressed, including the New York Times reporter who wrote in his article that “if there had been any women present, unquestionably there would have been screams when a magician conjured a white mouse onto the tip of his wand and poked it out, seemingly within arm’s length of the innocent bystanders.”
Audioscopiks worked better than the 3-D experiments of a decade earlier in part because of overall improvements in the quality of filmmaking and projection, but mostly because in the late 1920s, movies had stopped being silent. With the introduction of synchronized sound, filmmakers were able to trick two senses at once and overwhelm audiences with evidence that the unreal thing they were watching and hearing was actually happening. “Sound is a great factor in heightening the illusion,” the Times noted. “The seltzer-squirting episode, for example, is doubly effective, because you hear the zizzz and the splash when it strikes.” The film was a commercial and critical success and was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Short Subject (Novelty)—though it lost to a documentary about an explorer who flew a biplane over the peak of Mount Everest. MGM went on to commission two sequels, The New Audioscopiks (another collection of short demo clips) and Third Dimensional Murder (an original comedic narrative about a man who visits a spooky castle and is attacked by various scary creatures, including a witch, a skeleton, and Frankenstein’s monster).
While 3-D movies reached into theaters, other forms of stereoscopic media worked their way into workplaces and homes. In 1938, German inventor William Gruber developed a new method for photographing 3-D images using two consumer-grade cameras loaded with Eastman Kodak Company’s newly released Kodachrome color film. Gruber would shoot stereoscopic pairs of an image, print them onto fingernail-sized pieces of the translucent film, and then mount the two photos on opposing sides of a fist-sized paper disk. He also created a handheld stereoscope specially designed to view the little film reels—a device resembling a small pair of binoculars, with a small lever that would advance the reels from one image to the next.
When Gruber went on a trip to photograph the Oregon Caves National Monument with the rig, he was stopped by Harold Graves, the owner of a company that printed souvenir photographic postcards, who wanted to know why he had two cameras on one tripod. Gruber explained the invention, and shortly after, the two men went into business together to mass-produce and market the device. It made its public debut at the 1939 New York World’s Fair as the View-Master, and within decades it would become the most commercially successful stereoscopic device in history.
Gruber and Graves originally conceived of the View-Master as a high-tech alternative to postcards, an immersive way to experience faraway places, and sold it alongside film reels depicting locations like national parks. But when World War II began, another big market opened up. Between 1942 and 1945, the US Department of War purchased over 100,000 viewers and millions of slide reels to help teach soldiers to recognize ships and airplanes. Each reel included stereo photos of friendly and enemy craft at different ranges and altitudes, and in front of different backgrounds like blue sky or clouds.
After the war, all those vets returned home and bought the now familiar gadget for home entertainment or as a gift for their kids. And when Graves’s company obtained the rights in 1951 to make reels featuring Walt Disney’s characters and amusement parks, the View-Master was solidified as a cultural icon. Current parent company Mattel says that since the product was invented, consumers have purchased over 1.5 billion stereoscopic reels.
View-Masters weren’t the only entertainment gadget that caught on after World War II. Television was invented in the late 1920s, but the first consumer products were huge, expensive devices with tiny screens. In the late 1940s, the technology was finally ready for prime time—and with millions of soldiers settling down, buying homes, and starting families, TV sales boomed. By 1950, about one out of every ten American households owned a television. A year later, that number was one out of every four.
The television boom was good for electronics manufacturers and broadcasting companies, but bad for Hollywood. The days where everyone flocked to the “picture shows” were over; in order to attract customers back to the theaters, movie studios needed to tempt them with experiences they couldn’t get in their living rooms. So they launched a whole new generation of cinematic 3-D experiences.
American filmmaker Arch Oboler kicked off the “golden era” of 3-D movies with the 1952 film Bwana Devil, an action-adventure movie based on a t
rue story of man-eating lions that preyed on workers building a railroad in Kenya. Unlike the anaglyphic 3-D movies of the 1920s, Bwana Devil was presented via a polarized 3-D system: instead of lenses that filtered the wavelength of light into different colors (like red and green), the Natural Vision system used lenses that filtered the orientation of light waves into different polarizations (like whether they oscillate up and down or side to side). When the audience wore spectacles with two different polarized lenses—essentially, a pair of sunglasses—they could view a film in three dimensions and in true color.
Posters for Bwana Devil crowed that the new color 3-D was a “miracle of the age!” and promised “a lion in your lap!” and “a lover in your arms!” But initial reviews focused less on the eye candy and more on the eyeglasses. An article in the December 15, 1952, edition of Life magazine featured a now iconic J.R. Eyerman photograph of the film’s premiere at Hollywood’s Paramount Theatre—an auditorium full of elegant men in suits and women in dresses wearing goofy-looking cardboard sunglasses. “These megaloptic creatures,” the caption stated, “looked more startling than anything on the screen.”
Audiences loved the movie anyway. Bwana Devil went on to make more than $2.5 million at the box office, more than five times its production cost, and enough to count it among the ten biggest films of 1953. Soon all of Hollywood was scrambling to get more 3-D films into theaters.
Much of what they produced were low-quality B movies. 1953’s Robot Monster—a film about an evil creature from the moon, portrayed by an actor wearing a gorilla suit with a fishbowl “space helmet”—is widely regarded as one of the worst movies ever made. But there was so much demand for 3-D that the film made money anyway, earning over $1 million in box office on a tiny $50,000 budget. And the 3-D fad did produce some critical successes, especially in genres like sci-fi (It Came from Outer Space), monster movies (Creature from the Black Lagoon), and horror. André De Toth’s 1953 film House of Wax earned $23.8 million globally and influenced an entire generation of horror filmmakers; in 2014, the US Library of Congress added it to the National Film Registry, an elite selection of films recognized for their cultural, historic, or aesthetic significance.
House of Wax is also notable because it was the first 3-D feature to use stereophonic sound—all the audio in the film was recorded on multiple tracks and played on speakers set up on the sides, front, and rear of the auditorium, so that sounds seemed to come from the direction of an action. Paired with a 3-D picture, the stereo audio created an unprecedented sense of immersion; when the titular wax museum went up in flames, the sight and sound of crackling fire surrounded the viewer. “The result has a kind of spellbinding effect on the audience, giving a feeling of realism to a completely unreal story as well as a sense of participation,” according to an article in a 1953 issue of The Hollywood Reporter.
The 3-D film fad burned hot and burned out fast. Hollywood movie studios produced more than sixty 3-D movies in the first half of the 1950s, but when they were shown in public, the experience was often marred by technical issues caused by sloppy projection. By 1954, the golden age of 3-D movies was already ending, and John Norling, one of the producers of Audioscopiks, wrote an epitaph for the era in the magazine International Projectionist. “What does the future hold for 3-D? Nothing but interment unless the industry realizes its great potential and supports the research and development that will assure the perfection and convenience required,” he wrote. “The full possibilities of 3-D have not been explored.”
Chapter 2
THE ULTIMATE DISPLAY
Hollywood didn’t give up on immersive cinema when the 3-D fad was over. It just focused on another aspect of the theater experience that consumers couldn’t get watching TV in their living rooms—very big screens. One of the biggest was developed by Fred Waller, an engineer and former head of Paramount Pictures’ special effects department, after he noticed that shooting scenes with a wide-angle lens seemed to create a kind of three-dimensional effect in a film. It made him realize that filmmakers had been concentrating on duplicating stereopsis, but that other visual cues also contribute to depth perception, like peripheral vision. So Waller figured he could increase immersion if he made a screen that filled the observer’s entire field of view.
He spent fifteen years working on the problem before creating his most famous invention: Cinerama, a theatrical experience with a screen so big it could present “a photographic view of the scene as a human pair of eyes would see it.” The system used three projectors shining on different thirds of a convex screen that was 300 percent wider and 50 percent taller than a standard theater screen, stitching together a massive picture almost as big as the entire range of binocular vision. A Cinerama production would wrap around the audience and make them feel like they were literally inside the movie, not just staring at a picture framed on a wall.
In September 1952, Waller’s company debuted a full-length film called This Is Cinerama at the Broadway Theatre in New York City. The 115-minute movie was a vivid showcase for the new technology, featuring scenes from around the world, including a canal tour of Venice, a bullfight in Madrid, and the finale of Aida performed at La Scala in Milan. An article in the magazine Popular Mechanics described one segment of the film, a boat ride through the Cypress Gardens amusement park in Florida, as so real the audience reacted physically, leaning sideways as the boat tipped and ducking so they wouldn’t smack their heads as it went under a footbridge.
This Is Cinerama was an unqualified hit in New York, selling out for eight months at the Broadway Theatre before transferring to the newly rechristened Warner Cinerama Theatre in Times Square, where it ran for another year and a half. A handful of theaters in other major cities also converted to the format, and the film went on a traveling “road show” to sold-out crowds. Ultimately, the cost and complexity of the system kept it from entering widespread use—fewer than a dozen films were made using Waller’s three-projector setup. But some of the people who saw Cinerama found that the experience was hard to forget.
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One of those people was Morton Heilig, a Hollywood cinematographer who was inspired to do better. The problem with systems like Cinerama, he decided, was that they weren’t ambitious enough. Humans have five senses, but movie theaters engage only two of them. And besides, he figured, they don’t even engage those senses fully. What good is a curved screen that fills your field of view if you can see the edge of it when you turn your head, and what good is stereophonic sound if you can still hear a distracting conversation from the couple sitting in the row behind you in the theater?
“Every capable artist has been able to draw men into the realm of a new experience by making (either consciously or subconsciously) a profound study of the way their attention shifts,” Heilig wrote in a 1955 essay called “The Cinema of the Future.” “Like a magician he learns to lead man’s attention with a line, a color, a gesture, or a sound. Many are the devices to control the spectator’s attention at the opera, ballet, and theater . . . but the inability to eliminate the unessential is what loosens their electrifying grip.”
What was needed, Heilig argued, was a new kind of entertainment, one that could surround viewers in a simulation that blocked out distractions and engaged all their senses, allowing them to experience the world “in all its magnificent colors, depth, sounds, odors, and textures.” So he resolved to build an immersive media device that could do just that.
First, Heilig designed a stereoscopic headset—basically, a modern version of the Holmes scope, but with built-in television tubes that displayed a moving 3-D picture, instead of photographs printed on a piece of cardboard that showed a still image. Patented in 1960, the Telesphere Mask is now regarded as the first modern head-mounted display, a direct ancestor of twenty-first-century virtual reality hardware. But the device never worked perfectly, so Heilig only built a prototype and never took the invention into production.
> Next, Heilig decided to build something bigger—a kind of immersive one-person theater he called Sensorama. Patented in 1962, the device consisted of a single seat facing a wraparound hood; users sat down, grabbed on to handlebars, and pressed up against a viewer that looked something like the inside of a high-tech hockey mask. The eyes were binocular lenses, allowing the user to watch a wide-angle 3-D movie. The mouth was a small grille that the device could blow air through in order to simulate wind. The nose was another vent, this one equipped with a variety of scents that could be released to match the setting of a film. Small speakers on either side of the hood played stereo sound effects to further the illusion, and the whole rig could even vibrate and tilt to simulate motion.
Heilig produced several short films to demonstrate the simulator’s capabilities, including rides on a helicopter, a dune buggy, and a motorbike cruising through New York City. Writer Howard Rheingold described the motorbike ride after he tried one of the last working Sensorama devices in the mid-1980s. “I sat down, put my eyes and ears in the right places, and peered through the eyes of a motorcycle passenger at the streets of a city as they appeared . . . [from] the driver’s seat of a motorcycle in Brooklyn in the 1950s. I heard the engine start. I felt a growing vibration through the handlebar, and the 3D photo that filled much of my field of view came alive, animating into a yellowed, scratchy, but still effective 3D motion picture,” he wrote in his 1991 book Virtual Reality. “Sensorama was a bit like looking up the Wright brothers and taking their original prototype for a spin.”
Defying Reality Page 4