Three-dimensional stereoviews were wildly popular in the mid-19th century. The Art of Stereography: Rediscovering Vintage Three-Dimensional Images Wealthy families posed for stereoscope portraits. There were comedic, staged views, like one showing a maid sneaking out of her house via manhole to see her lover. They gawped at Tintern Abbey in Wales and the Temple of Jupiter in Lebanon, and gazed at close-ups of delicate fancywork. At pennies per view, stereoscopy could become a truly mass medium: People excitedly purchased shots of anything and everything. “People loved it,” laughs Laura Schiavo, an assistant professor of museum studies at George Washington University. In 1856, the firm offered 10,000 views in its catalog, and within six years they’d grown to one million. The London Stereoscopic Company sold affordable devices its photographers fanned out across Europe to snap stereoscopic images. Once Brewster’s design hit the market, the stereoscope exploded in popularity. “All these inventions just dovetailed perfectly by mid-century,” notes Douglas Heil, a professor and author of The Art of Stereography. Better yet, the photograph had recently been invented, which meant Brewster’s stereoscope could display not just crude hand drawings, but vivid images captured from real life. Insert a card with stereo images -a “view”-and presto! A scene came alive. Wheatstone created a table-size device to demonstrate the effect, with a viewer that sent a unique image to each eye: the world’s first stereoscope.Ī decade later, the scientist David Brewster refined the design, crafting a hand-held device you could raise to your eyes. This was, he noted, precisely how our vision works each eye sees a slightly different perspective. If you drew two pictures of something-say, a cube, or a tree-from two slightly different perspectives, and then viewed each one through a different eye, your brain would assemble them into a three-dimensional view. In June 1838, the British scientist Charles Wheatstone published a paper describing a curious illusion he’d discovered. Why does VR get its hooks into our psyche? What’s so intense about 3-D? That’s a question people pondered back in the mid-19th century, when they peered into an exotic new tool for summoning virtual worlds: the stereoscope. VR, as the filmmaker Chris Milk proclaims, is “an empathy machine.” By hijacking our entire field of vision, it has more persuasive power than TV, radio or any other previous medium. The high-tech age has given birth to many addictive new media, including websites, YouTube videos and endless text chat. Documentary filmmakers are flocking to shoot VR “experiences,” using newfangled 360-degree cameras. Doctors use it to show the ventricles of the heart artists create hallucinogenic visualizations game designers build immersive shoot-’em-ups and kookily creative tools like Tilt Brush, which lets you draw virtual sculptures in the air. As head-mounted devices-such as the Oculus Rift and HTC Vive-have dropped below $1,000 (or as low as $5 for Google Cardboard), more people than ever are peering into this new realm. VR, it seems, is finally edging into the mainstream.
“They feel like they’re in whatever world they’ve been placed into.” “It’s really deep immersion,” Herzog told me later. They’d read about this stuff and seen videos about it. Later, when they put their headsets down, the students told Herzog they were stunned by the intensity of the experience-and how much more emotionally they intuited the brutal dislocations wrought by war. (Full disclosure: I sometimes write for the New York Times Magazine too.) As Herzog’s students craned their necks around, they saw the swampy terrain of South Sudan and the dilapidated buildings where the Ukrainian children played.
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It was called “The Displaced,” and came courtesy of a free VR app launched by the New York Times Magazine, which you view by placing a phone in a Google Cardboard viewer. The kids were viewing VR footage of refugee children who’d fled war in South Sudan, Syria and Ukraine. But mentally, they were teleporting around the world.
Their bodies, officially, were at Flood Brook School in Vermont, perched atop stools and set among a set of comfy couches, whiteboards and cubbies. If you walked into Charles Herzog’s classroom last spring, you’d have seen a peculiarly modern sight: middle schoolers all staring into virtual-reality gear.
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