Morton Heilig

Morton Leonard Heilig (December 22, 1926 - May 14, 1997) was an American filmmaker, cinematographer, and inventor whose immersive multimedia devices of the late 1950s and 1960s anticipated many ideas later associated with virtual reality. He built the Sensorama, a multisensory arcade-style simulator patented in 1962, and earlier patented a stereoscopic head-worn viewer often described as one of the first head-mounted display designs. Several books and articles have called him a "father of virtual reality".

Heilig approached immersion from cinema rather than computing. He held no programmable display or motion tracking, and his systems played pre-recorded film, yet his patents set out the goal of engaging sight, hearing, touch, and smell at once, a goal that recurs in later virtual reality research.

Early life and education

Heilig was born in New York City on December 22, 1926. According to the biographical record kept by the USC HMH Foundation, which holds his papers and films, he studied pre-engineering at Cornell University in 1943 and took a Bachelor of Philosophy at the University of Chicago in 1944, then studied painting at the Academie Julian in Paris and philosophy at the University of Geneva. He earned a diploma in film direction from the Centro Sperimentale di Cinematografia in Rome around 1950 and a Master of Communication Arts from the Annenberg School of Communication at the University of Pennsylvania in 1958. The same record notes that he lived for several years in France, Mexico, and Italy and was fluent in French, Spanish, and Italian.

Film career

Heilig worked as a director, cinematographer, writer, editor, and cameraman, and was a member of the Directors Guild of America. He was credited as producer, director, writer, cinematographer, and editor on the short film Assembly Line (1961), which won the San Giorgio Medal at the Venice Film Festival, and on Destination: Man (1965). He also worked on the television series Diver Dan (1961) and held a production role on the feature They Shoot Horses, Don't They? (1969).

Cinema of the Future

In 1955 Heilig published an essay, "The Cinema of the Future" (Spanish title "El Cine del Futuro"), in the Mexico City arts journal Espacios. The essay argued that film should reproduce the full range of human sensory experience rather than only sight and sound, and it set out the conceptual basis for the machines he went on to build. The text was reprinted in the academic journal Presence: Teleoperators and Virtual Environments in 1992, which helped circulate it among later virtual reality researchers.

Inventions

Telesphere Mask

Heilig filed for a stereoscopic head-worn viewer on May 24, 1957, and the patent, US 2,955,156, "Stereoscopic-television apparatus for individual use", was granted on October 4, 1960. The device, sometimes called the Telesphere Mask, was a hollow head casing with two eye openings, each holding a small television tube and a wide-angle lens, plus earphones and air nozzles able to deliver currents of varying velocity, temperature, and odor. The patent describes lenses intended to fill a horizontal and vertical arc of more than 140 degrees. Because it presented a stereoscopic image directly in front of the eyes from head-worn displays, later histories of VR cite it as an early head-mounted display concept, although it had no motion tracking and showed only fixed film.

Sensorama

The Sensorama was Heilig's best-known machine, an upright cabinet that a viewer leaned into to watch a stereoscopic 3D film while the seat vibrated, fans produced wind, stereo speakers gave directional sound, and scent units released smells cued by the film. He filed the patent on January 10, 1961, and US 3,050,870, "Sensorama simulator", was granted on August 28, 1962; the patent describes optics giving a field of view of nearly 180 degrees and film magazines carrying paired images plus several control tracks to synchronize the effects. Heilig shot, produced, and edited the short films himself using his own three-dimensional camera. The titles included a motorcycle ride through New York streets, a belly dancer, a dune buggy ride, a helicopter sequence, and a piece called I'm a Coca-Cola Bottle. The motorcycle film paired seat vibration and engine sound with wind from fans and the smells of the city.

Heilig pitched the Sensorama as a coin-operated arcade attraction and as a showroom display for companies including Ford and International Harvester, but it found no buyers, and he was unable to attract investment to develop it further. The high cost of producing multisensory films, rather than any flaw in the idea of engaging multiple senses, is usually given as the reason it did not reach a market.

Experience Theater

Heilig also patented a multisensory cinema design for an audience rather than a single viewer. He filed it on March 9, 1966, and US 3,469,837, "Experience theater", was granted on September 30, 1969. The patent specifies a concave hemispherical screen filling roughly 170 degrees horizontally and 120 degrees vertically, steeply raked seating so spectators could sit one above another, polarized three-dimensional projection, directional sound from many speakers, scent delivery, temperature-controlled air, and seats that could tilt and vibrate in time with the film.

Legacy

Heilig's devices were largely overlooked during his lifetime, and they were a separate line of development from the computer-driven head-mounted display that Ivan Sutherland and his students built in the late 1960s, sometimes called the Sword of Damocles. Later writers grouped Heilig with figures such as Sutherland and Jaron Lanier in accounts of how immersive media developed, and the USC HMH Foundation, established to preserve his archive, presents him as the "father of virtual reality". His central claim, that an immersive medium should address smell, touch, and the wider field of vision rather than the framed image alone, anticipated work on multisensory and olfactory displays that continued after his death on May 14, 1997.