“Virtual reality” is an oxymoron, of course. That was one of the criticisms of the term back in the 1980s, when the question of what to call the slightly ludicrous assemblages of head-mounted screens and sensors then being developed, and the experience of being in an illusory space they were designed to provide, was still up for debate. “Artificial reality” was more popular for a while—when the New York Times ran a front-page story on the technology in 1989, it was headlined “For Artificial Reality, Wear a Computer”—though that term is no less contradictory. Ted Nelson, who had coined “hypertext” a couple decades earlier, proposed “virtuality”; others preferred “cyberspace,” which was not yet solely associated with the internet. (It would be some time before my favorite alternative, “phantomatics,” coined by Polish author Stanisław Lem in the early 1960s while speculating about the possibility of such technology, made its way into English.) But in the end, which is to say by sometime in the early 1990s, “virtual reality” prevailed.
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