Short answers, pulled from the story.
Ivan Sutherland and his student Bob Sproull created the first head-mounted display system for immersive simulation in 1968. This device, known as The Sword of Damocles, hung from the ceiling of a Harvard laboratory and displayed simple wire-frame models of rooms. It laid the foundational architecture for all future virtual reality systems despite its heavy and unwieldy design.
Jaron Lanier coined the term virtual reality in a business context and developed the Data Glove during the 1980s while working at his company VPL Research. The Data Glove tracked hand movements to allow users to manipulate objects in a digital space and transformed VR from a passive viewing experience into an interactive one. Mattel licensed the technology to create the Power Glove for the Nintendo Entertainment System in 1989.
Sega announced the Sega VR headset for the Mega Drive in 1991, and Virtuality launched the first mass-produced, networked, multiplayer VR entertainment system costing up to $73,000 per multi-pod. Nintendo released the Virtual Boy in 1995, which became infamous for causing dizziness, nausea, and headaches, leading to its quick demise. The market could not sustain the high costs and technical limitations of these ambitious launches.
The modern era of virtual reality began in 2010 when Palmer Luckey designed the first prototype of the Oculus Rift. This prototype offered a 90-degree field of vision and used software to pre-distort the rendered image in real-time to solve distortion issues. John Carmack presented the project at the E3 video game trade show in 2012, and a Kickstarter campaign in 2013 shipped the first development kits.
Virtual reality is used in medicine to allow medical students and surgeons to practice complex procedures without risk to real patients, with studies at North Carolina medical institutions showing significant improvements in technical performance. In psychology, Virtual Reality Exposure Therapy helps individuals with post-traumatic stress disorder, phobias, and agoraphobia by guiding them through simulated environments that mimic real-world triggers in a safe setting. By 2021, the European Union approved the first VR-based flight simulation training device for rotorcraft pilots.
Prolonged use of VR headsets can cause motion sickness known as cybersickness, with women experiencing symptoms at rates of around 77% compared to 33% for men. Users face physical dangers such as tripping over objects or colliding with walls, and The Wall Street Journal reported injuries to the leg, hand, arm, shoulder, and cervical vertebrae in January 2022. Privacy concerns have intensified as persistent tracking makes the technology vulnerable to mass surveillance and data from eye-tracking sensors can reveal a user's ethnicity, personality traits, and mental health conditions.