DEFINITION OF VIRTUAL REALITY:
Virtual reality ( its abbrevation is "V.R.") is one of the hottest researches and development areas in the computer industry today. It makes the use of sophisticated computers that permit an almost complete interaction between the man and the machine he is connected to by some sensors that stimulate his principle senses.So, its underlying premise is to create more intuitive ways for men and computers to work together. As regards the topic of the communication and the personal experience, V.R. can be generally defined as a real or simulated environment in which a receptive person experiments the telepresence. The term "telepresence" means experimenting the presence of another environment through the use of a mean of communication; consequently, the more a communicative environment is virtual, the best the man experiments the sense of telepresence.In other words, V.R. is a discipline which studies the connection between the real spaces and the virtual ones during the interaction between one or more elements of reality and the ones of virtuality.

 

HISTORY AND DIFFUSION OF VIRTUAL REALITY:
V.R. developped among some marginal subcultures: the science fiction, the cyberpunk and the hacker counterculture, but also among the military world, the computer industries and some institutions like NASA. Like other important and complex inventions as the telephone and the television, it is so difficult to determine the beginning of V.R.; anyway, we can state that V.R. was built up in a narrative form in 1984 to become a complicated topic and a commercialized technology in 1992. In fact, the term "cyberspace" was introduced for the first time in 1984 in "Neuromancer", the science fiction novel written by William Gibson; in this work, the word "cyberspace" described a future world created by the networking of multiple V.R. systems and environments. Instead, as regards the technological development of V.R.. it was due to Jaron Lanier, a Californian information technician who had got the brilliant and lucky idea to invent an invisible guitar. The plan thrilled one of his friends, Thomas Zimmermann, an aspirant singer expert in cybernetic tchnology, who patented the invention of the "data glove", that is a special glove provided with optical-fiber sensors and connected to the viewer of the computer that permits to touch all the objects created by the computer. Then, the project was improved with the addition of the "eye-phone", which can transmit particular images and sounds through stereoscopic glasses and stereophonic earphones; moreover, special devices called "trackers" were attached to this equipment: they translated human moviments into coordinates, which were in a second time fed back to the computer so that the model of the virtual world could be appopriately changed. Anyway, the initial outburst of the invention was partially stopped by the complexity of the project itself: in fact, every time the person moves his body, the images producted by the computer have to be ricalculated to reproduce the known reality in the best possible way. Consequently, to create for example a coloured solid well lit and shaded it was necessary more sophisticated and expensive computers. So, the plan, as it was devised by Lanier and Zimmermann,was industrialized by the Sylicon Valley, but the first real and public cyberspace exploration was obviously undertaken by NASA. In 1932, Thomas Furness created "Super Cockpit", a new affordable system thought out to make more efficient air battle pilot's tasks .It consisted of a head-mounted display which organized the technical data gathered by the radar to represent through simple graphic signs the position and the speed of the plan, the mark and the underlying scenery. However, even if the plan was technologically meaningful, it was too expensive and so it could be used only by specialized industries; for this reason, the project "Super Cockpit" did not attract the public attention that will be peculiar to the cheaper models. In fact, three years later, in 1985, Michael McGreevy realized VIVED ( "Virtual Visual Environment Display"), a low price virtual environment that permitted to substitute the expensive helmets used by the U.S. Air Force to simulate military flights with simple and cheap graphic systems. Moreover, in this period the Japanese multinational Atari Corporation took on a great importance; founded by Nolan Bushnell in the middle of the 1970s and soon gave up of the Warner Communication, it became one of the first interactive games software productors.
In fact, it soon became part of the uncontrollable and uncontrolled commerce of virtual enterteinment technologies because of the great success of its videogame "Pacman". Anyway, the real commercial development of V.R. started in about 1988, that is when a mass commerce of virtual systems spread rapidly: V.P.L.( "Virtual Programming Languages") increased a virtual system that connected data glove imput to a head-mounted display which took users inside a three-dimensional world, while Autodesk built up a cheap V.R. software for Computer Aided Design. In 1989, V.R. spread among public opinions: the esotheric cyberpunk magazine "Mondo 2000" became a platform for V.R. development publishing the article called "It is live or it is Autodesk". Moreover, on April of the same year, the New York Time published an article about V.R. and Jarome Lenier.
In the meanwhile, V.L.P. and Autodesk launched their projects in the "Virtual Reality Day" and showed successfully their products at Siggraoh 89, the important annual conference on the world of computer-generated graphics.
In 1990, Jacobson and Furness founded the Human Interface Technology Lab (HITL) then moved to the University of Washington, and organized a conference on the academical informational network calling it "sci.virtual.world.".
In the same year, Mattel begun the mass commercialization of the Powerglove , a videogame controller similiar to the cheap virtual systems.
In 1991, the publication of the book "Virtual reality" written by Howard Rheingold caused the diffusion of V.R. among a wider public: there were already 400 virtual systems all over the world, above all in Japan.
Moreover, the British firm "W Industries" put the first virtual enterteinment, called "Virtuality" into circulation, and joined up with the Horizon Enterteinment to commercialize V.R. games in the U.S.A.
In 1992, the famous film "Lawnmower man" increased V.R. technology's celebrity farther on: in fact, the absurd plot ( that is an obsessed scientist who artificially increases the village fool's cleverness) is represented through an impressive computer graphics.
On May1993, "Wild palms", another television programme about V.R., was telecast.
So, there was a circular process: the publicity attracted other publicity ; even if it did not make people understand the technology power, it was anyhow so much important to V.R. commerce.

 

CYBERPUNK COUNTERCULTURE:
The cyberpunk subculture started up in about the middle of the 1980s, when the V.R. made its way thorugh the Sylicon Valley high-teach industries and the social and political ideals peculiar to the Californian counterculture arisen in the middle of the 1960s.
This movement, formed moreover by young people ( thirty years old an average), influenced different fields: the literature, the politics, the psychedelic and the musical world, but also the thetrical, cinematographic and comic-strip communication.
The word "Cyberpunk" was coined by the writer Bruce Bepkie to designate the V.R. landing to an alternative culture and a new spiritual comprehension.
In fact, Cyberpunks presupposed a new association with technology that is considerated able to increase human capacity and so to exceed mankind's limits.
Bruce Sterling, in the preface of "Mirrorshades", the anthology of cyberpunk writers edited by Sterling himself, asserted : "For the cyberpunks, by stark contrast, technology is visceral. It is not the bottled geie of remote Big Science boffins; it is persuasive, utterly intimate. Not outside us, but next to us. Under our skin; often, inside our minds."
"Mondo 2000" was the greatest cyberpunk pubblication of the 1980s: it was not only about high-teach industries or hacker culture, but also about science-fiction, alternative music, sexuality and drugs. The main themes dealt with were the theme of body invasion ( prosthetic limbs, implanted circuitry, cosmetic surgery and genetic alteration), and the even more powerful theme of mind invasion ( brain-computer interfaces, artificial intelligence and neurochemistry).
The most important promoter of the technical printing was, for a certain period, Jaron Lenier, who became the principal spokesman of the V.R. anarchical potential.
V.R. was considerated able of helping people to communicate, releasing their imagination; so, it became the cry peculiar to the latest generation of advocates of technology that perceived the solution to all the political and social problems just in virtual technology itself.
Anyway, it was soon created an atmosphere of tension between the commercial aim to insert V.R. in the mainstream and cyberpunk absolute trust in a social revolutionary technology.
In fact, even if in 1973 Stuart Brand asserted that computers, which were widely diffusioned in 1980s, could change people's life for the better,they were anyhow under the multinational controll.
So, the cyberpunk subculture became cynical as regards the mass commerce of V.R. that lost its attractive power for those who had considered it as a means to revolution the all society.
On the other hand, V.R. had to become desiderable and interesting to the mainstream to demonstrate its different applications to various fileds as the medicine, the architecture and the design.
So, while V.R. became mainstream, it denied its connexion with psychotropic drugs praised by the cyberpunk subculture, even if it was closely linked to this movement from 1988 to 1990.
In fact, the most of the initial V.R. publicity was focused on eletronic LSD; Timothy Leary himself, the famous paladin in 1960s who proclaimed personal computers "The LSD of the 1980s", was involved by Autodesk in one of the first promotional films about V.R.
Anyway, in that period V.R. was still a marginal topic, and maybe a constrasting one, to the mainstream and its connexion with LSD was introduced in a culture that admitted the use of drugs.
So, the mainstream culture started, in a foressable way, to warm people of the possible psychic damages caused by a virtual experience; however, the danger of V.R. habituation was without a clinical fundation, because it essentially arose from the cybernetic experiences resounded by the cyberpunk culture.
Then, when firms as V.L.P. or Hit Lab started to commercialize V.R. instruments in about the middle of 1989, the virtual technology was gradually keep away from the references to the use of synthetic drugs, that was exclusively attributed to the cyberpunk subculture.

 

PHONE PHREAKS AND HACKERS:
The cyberpunk counterculture believed that all information should be free and that access to computers should be unlimited to come to a real horizontal and democratic communication.
Moreover, Lee Fernestein theorized that it was necessary to activate more and more communicative networks through a rhizomatic model that permitted a horizontal diffusion of knowledge without a privieged emitting.
The first pratical objections leaning to these ideals were raised in 1950s-1960s by people called "phone phreaks" and others called "hackers".
In 1960s, Capitain Church and Richard Cheshire started the unlawful telephonic piracy to cheat the "Bell Company", the American telephonic company, to permit people to telephone free.
The collectivization of the means of communication was practised by phone phreaks also activating the "phona chat", that is virtual zones created in telephones connections in which people arranged to meet themselves to discuss freely. (It was a very rudimentary form of the today's chat-line).
The revendication of the right to communication and to information was transferred to the information world by hackers.
It is very important to stress that the term "hacker", even if it is usually used to designate destructive and criminal practises realized in the information world against third parties, defines a real ethic and life style based on deep principles of community and horizontality.
Steven Levy, in his work called "Hackers: heros of the computer revolution" stated: "Today, the media has perverted the meaning of the term, using it to refer to childish individuals who use their talents to committ illegal acts. And what has become of the original hackers? They are slowly disappearing and being replaced by quotas, schedules, and mediocre night-school educations."
The first hackering practises dated back to the 1950s, when there were just punched card calculators. In this period, a group of students attended the M.I.T. (Massachusetts Institute of Technology), one of the most famous school of information in America, succeeded in accessing to the central scholastic computer upsetting all the professors' plans.
During 1970s and 1980s, hackers'actions were more and more frequent; it is important to mention the Hamburg group Chaos Computer Blub (CCC) that in 1984 caused the failure of BTX, a telecommunication service conceived by German post-offices in which only the subscribers could receive or transmit personal communications.
In short, it is true that some of the most ortodox hackers are famous to have violated the private property and the penal code but it is not correct infer that the illegal actions were the hacker culture's essence, because hackers beat themselves to the socialization of information knowledge and instruments.

 

CONCLUSIONS:
The recent emergency to discuss about V.R. demonstrates that the acceptance of technology implies more than creating new and more efficient hardware and software.
V.R. started up as a marginal technology associated on the one hand to the armed forces, on the other to the science fiction and the cyberpunk subculture; it was collected as a technological product by industries, but it was modyfied to adapt itself to the mainstream's values; so, its attraction was especially due to its commercialization.
Moreover, V.R. made an alteration of paradigms: computers could be not only simple symbols processors, but also reality generators; this change permitted to create an association between V.R. and a widest spectrum of cultural tropes.

The exaggerated claims over V.R. have beeen moderated and actually V.R. has a firm infrastructure and a receptive public.
Its success maybe was due to the tecnological development itself, but this brief research has tried to demonstrate that the process is more complicated and closely linked to the cultural context in which the technology was introduced.

 

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"Realtà virtuale e dialogo: applicazioni della realtà virtuale" Carlo Galimberti