Newton's Apple

Newton's Apple was a TV program on PBS. It was a family science series produced by KTCA Twin Cities Public Television in Saint Paul, Minnesota, between 1983 and 1998, and it answered viewers' science questions with hands-on experiments and field trips. In its 11th season (1993-94) it ran a program on virtual reality that showed a variety of VR systems, including an active-shutter glasses-based 3D display based on a CRT computer monitor, and a gyroscope-style motion platform called the Cybertron that the host was strapped into while wearing a head-mounted display.

The virtual reality segment was part of show 1113, which episode listings date to 8 January 1994. In it, host David Heil and Ben Delaney, editor of the newsletter CyberEdge Journal, demonstrated desktop, stereoscopic and head-mounted forms of VR. CyberEdge Journal was a bimonthly VR newsletter based in Sausalito, California, which Delaney published and edited from 1991 to 1997. The show's printed teacher's guides turned the segment into a classroom lesson, and later seasons returned to related subjects such as motion simulator rides and robot telepresence.

Reviewed 27 September 2026. Checked the TPT series page (archived), TVmaze episode dates, the YouTube segment captions and upload data, the ERIC teacher's guides for seasons 9-12, 13 and 15, the AI Expert 1994 resource guide, StrayLight's Pleasure Island page and Ben Delaney's author page against every claim. About review dates.

Background

Newton's Apple was produced by KTCA Twin Cities Public Television (TPT) and broadcast on public television stations nationwide. The journalist Ira Flatow, known as host of the public radio program Science Friday, was its first host. Episode listings run from 15 October 1983 to 3 January 1998 and count 195 episodes over 15 seasons. By the early 1990s the program featured host David Heil, field reporter Peggy Knapp and naturalist Nancy Gibson, and each episode combined several unrelated segments.

The series was made possible by a grant from 3M, and its educational materials were developed with the National Science Teachers Association. Printed guides for educators accompanied the broadcasts, and TPT describes the program as one of the most-used video programs in American middle schools. The series won the American Association for the Advancement of Science's Science Journalism Award, the Parent's Choice Award and the 1989 Daytime Emmy Award for Outstanding Children's Series.

Virtual reality segment

Show 1113 aired as the last episode of season 11, which ran from October 1993 to January 1994. Its four segments covered Mount Rushmore, virtual reality, candles and chimpanzees. The teacher's guide gives the VR segment's length as 7:53. A copy of the segment was uploaded to YouTube in 2009 by the channel VRtifacts, which describes it as dating from "circa 1993".

Desktop VR

The segment opens with Heil looking through a View-Master. Delaney, introduced as editor of CyberEdge Journal, defines virtual reality as a computer-generated world that is three-dimensional and interactive. He first shows a virtual office running on an ordinary desktop computer, which Heil explores with a joystick. Delaney explains that each object in the scene is built with 3D modeling and object-oriented programming, so that it carries properties such as hardness or the ability to be moved and to hold things, in addition to its geometry. He calls this a through-the-window system, in which the monitor acts as a window onto the virtual world without giving a true 3D image.

Stereoscopic workstation

Delaney then explains stereopsis: each eye sees a slightly different view, which gives depth perception. He shows an antique stereoscope card as an ancestor of the View-Master. A high-powered workstation displays a stereoscopic image of a jet aircraft, viewed through liquid crystal shutter glasses that blank each eye in turn while the computer alternates the left and right images at the same rate. Small ultrasonic transmitters on the glasses send an inaudible tone to a triangular receiver unit, and the system calculates head position from the difference in the time the signal takes to reach each of three receivers. This lets Heil look under and over the aircraft by moving his head, a form of head tracking that Delaney describes as replacing the joystick with the viewer's head.

Cybertron

For full immersion Delaney takes Heil to the Cybertron, a gyroscope-like cage that moves as a motion platform. The teacher's guide defines Cybertron as "a high-tech virtual reality arcade game that delivers a total-body experience". The head-mounted display used with it is described in the segment as a helmet containing two small flat color screens, one per eye, with optics that make the image appear farther away, plus stereo headphones and a magnetic tracker on top that reports where the user's head is and where the user is looking. After being strapped in, Heil flies the jet shown earlier on the workstation.

CyberTron was an arcade product of StrayLight Corp. of Warren, New Jersey. A virtual reality resource guide by Jenny Heath, published in AI Expert in May 1994, lists it as a VR arcade game with a gyroscopic motion platform, shaded graphics, stereo sound, a joystick and several software packages. StrayLight states that it installed two CyberTron systems permanently at Pleasure Island at Walt Disney World in November and December 1993, where a three-minute ride cost $10.

Applications and outlook

Asked whether VR had practical uses beyond entertainment, Delaney describes an application he calls wheelchair VR, in which a wheelchair user rolls through a computer model of an apartment or office building to test its accessibility before it is built. He predicts that computers, head-mounted displays and tracking systems will keep getting smaller, faster and better, and that in the distant future people may not be able to tell virtual reality from reality.

Teacher's guide

The season 11 teacher's guide lesson for show 1113 poses four questions: what virtual reality is, how a virtual world is created, what its promising aspects are, and what problems current VR worlds have. Its background text describes two approaches to VR: a booth with a computer monitor and joystick, such as a simulated cockpit, and a more expensive "helmet and gloves" approach in which one image is placed in front of each eye to create stereoscopic vision, a computer updates the scene and sound as the head turns, and sensors in a glove report the hand's position, with some gloves sending pressure vibrations back to the wearer to signal contact with a virtual object. It lists uses for people with disabilities and for industry, including designing parts without physical mock-ups, running chemistry experiments without risk and training on new equipment.

The lesson suggests looking through a View-Master or antique stereoscope with one eye closed, and designing a video game on paper. Its main activity uses two birthday candles, a pane of window glass and a glass of water to make a reflected candle flame appear to burn underwater. Suggested readings include articles on VR in education from Educational Technology and The Computing Teacher and a 5 October 1992 Business Week feature on virtual reality. The 1995 volume that collects seasons 9 to 12 covers programs originally broadcast from 1991 through 1994, and notes that educators could tape the programs and use them in class for three years from the broadcast date.

Related segments

The VR segment was referenced again in later teacher's guides. The season 13 lesson on simulator rides (show 1307) explains how designers of simulators and virtual reality rides use peripheral vision, motion parallax and moving seats to create illusions, and lists show 1113 as an additional resource. The season 15 guide says that Eileen Galindo, then in her second season with the show, answers questions about virtual reality among other topics that season, and its lesson on NASA robots (show 1512) describes controllers using "virtual reality telepresence" to see what a space robot sees.

Show	Air date	Segment	Notes
1113	8 January 1994	Virtual Reality	Heil and Delaney demonstrate desktop VR, shutter-glasses stereo and the Cybertron
1307	25 November 1995	Simulator Rides	Guide links motion simulator rides to virtual reality illusions
1512	27 December 1997	NASA Robots; Mars VR	Guide covers robot telepresence

Earlier episodes also covered related imaging topics, including holograms (19 November 1983), computer graphics (17 November 1984) and Omnimax film technology (5 December 1992).

See also

• History of virtual reality
• Head-mounted display
• Ultrasonic tracking
• Electromagnetic tracking
• VR arcade