This photo was taken in 1989 at a NASA research center, and the technological descendants of this fascinating experiment eventually made their way to Nintendo — and even to Palmer Luckey's Oculus.
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NASA's project was called VIEW, and it focused on developing a virtual reality headset.
The goal wasn't gaming or virtual work meetings, but rather enabling unmanned space missions through robot control via the headset, as well as providing 3D visualization of cosmological environments.
The research fell short on a practical level, since the required computing power and bulky hardware were incompatible with spaceflight. But commercially and scientifically, it was an extraordinary success.
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The gloves worn by the user were fitted with optical fibers running along the fingers, with a light source at the end of each fiber.
Each time the user bent a finger, some of the light leaked from the fiber at the bending points, and a dedicated sensor at the other end of the fiber detected the drop in light intensity to measure the degree of finger flexion.
To track the position and movement of the head and hands in space, a magnetic field was induced around the user, and every movement created a magnetic disturbance that sensors measured with precision.
The headset was built by combining small LCD screens salvaged from pocket televisions inside a cut-down motorcycle helmet, and to simulate a wide-angle display, special lenses were incorporated that deliberately distorted and significantly magnified the image.
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The government funding NASA poured into the project enabled the technology to be developed during its pre-commercial phase, allowing it to reach the consumer market in a far more mature state.
The gloves were developed under contract by VPL Research. The company filed patents on the technology, which were later used to manufacture virtual reality gloves for Nintendo. To reduce costs, the optical fibers were replaced by carbon-ink traces that changed their electrical resistance in proportion to finger flexion.
NASA's experiment made use of lens technology from LEEP, a company that had originally developed it for panoramic photography. The technology was based on deliberate distortion of the field of view to achieve a wide viewing angle, with the distortions corrected in software. In 2012, Palmer Luckey applied these same optical principles to build the first prototype of the Oculus virtual reality headset — a company that was later acquired by Facebook.
Another beneficiary of the project was Polhemus, which gained recognition as a manufacturer of motion-capture sensors. Its products were embedded in a wide range of applications, including flight simulators and medical imaging systems — technologies that remain in use to this day.
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Stories like this remind us of the importance of research, even when its commercial purpose isn't clear at the outset. Significant research discoveries will always find practical and commercial applications, beyond the intellectual richness they provide in their own right.
It's also worth remembering the power of patience. It's easy to assume that artificial intelligence was born less than five years ago, but a brief look at its history reveals decades of tireless, painstaking research — and today we are simply reaping the rewards.
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👋 Hi, I'm Shlomo Strauss — follow me for more content on science and technology.