The Early History of Visual Virtuality with Two Eyes
Nicholas J Wade · Virtual Worlds · 2025
Visual virtuality can be seen as involving the processing and perception of pictorial images. The production of such representations has a longer history than speculations about their perception. Pictorial images of objects and scenes lack two dimensions present in their subject matter—depth and motion. Instruments to investigate stereoscopic depth and apparent motion were invented in the early 1830s. Wheatstone devised stereoscopes and conducted experiments with them; Plateau and Stampfer independently crafted devices for presenting sequences of slightly different patterns that created the impression of motion. Wheatstone later proposed how moving and stereoscopic images could be combined. Thereafter, interpretations of virtual depth and motion perception became more concerned with central processing rather than being based on geometrical optics.