You’ll have to forgive me, I spent most of the morning thinking and writing about VR. In the lead-up to Apple’s expected headset announcement at WWDC next week, I did a one-person crash course into the world of extended reality, from its birth in the laboratories in the ’50s and ’60s to the current crop of headsets. It’s at once an interesting and frustrating journey, and one that has had more than a few overlaps with robotics.
It could be the fact that I’m fresh off a week at Automate, but I spent much of the research process comparing and contrasting the two fields. There’s a surprising bit of overlap. Like robotics, science fiction predated real-world VR by several decades. As with automatons, the precise origin of artificially created virtual worlds is a tough one to pin down, but Stanley Weinbaum’s 1935 short story “Pygmalion’s Spectacles” is often cited as the fictional origin of the VR hea...
