Benjamin Beil, Gundolf S. Freyermuth, Hanns Christian Schmidt, Raven Rusch (eds.) Playful Materialities

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**Benjamin Beil** is a professor for media studies and digital culture at the Department of Media Culture and Theater at the University of Cologne.

**Gundolf S. Freyermuth** is a writer, media producer, and co-founder of the Cologne Game Lab of the Technical University Cologne (in 2010, together with Prof. Björn Bartholdy). **Hanns Christian Schmidt** is a professor for Game Design at Macromedia University for Applied Sciences (Cologne) and a research assistant at the Institute of Media Culture and Theater at the University of Cologne.

**Raven Rusch** is an artist, musician and game developer. He is co-ceo of the start-up "neoludic games," and works part-time as research assistant at the Cologne Game Lab of the Technical University Cologne.

Benjamin Beil, Gundolf S. Freyermuth, Hanns Christian Schmidt, Raven Rusch (eds.)

# **Playful Materialities**

The Stuff That Games Are Made Of

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### **First published in 2022 by transcript Verlag, Bielefeld © Benjamin Beil, Gundolf S. Freyermuth, Hanns Christian Schmidt, Raven Rusch (eds.)**

Cover layout: Maria Arndt, Bielefeld Cover illustration: Raven Rusch Printed by Majuskel Medienproduktion GmbH, Wetzlar Print-ISBN 978-3-8376-6200-9 PDF-ISBN 978-3-8394-6200-3 EPUB-ISBN 978-3-7328-6200-9 https://doi.org/10.14361/9783839462003 ISSN of series: 2702-8240 eISSN of series: 2702-8259

Printed on permanent acid-free text paper.

#### **Preface and Acknowledgments**

Benjamin Beil/Gundolf S. Freyermuth/Hanns Christian Schmidt/Raven Rusch | 7

## **PLACES**

**Vegas, Disney, and the Metaverse** On the Material Anticipation of Virtual Worlds and Virtual Play in the Second Half of the 20th Century Gundolf S. Freyermuth | 17

#### **Augmenting Materialities**

A Case Study of MASCHINENKLANGWERK Isabel Grünberg/Raven Rusch/David Wildemann | 99

## **EXHIBITS**

### **Let's Play the Exhibition!**  Radiohead's KID A MNESIA EXHIBITION, Virtual Museums, and Games Isabelle Hamm | 123

## **To Craft a Game Arts Curators Kit**

A Collective Record of How to Publicly Exhibit Video Games Around the Globe Rene G. Cepeda/Chaz Evans | 145

#### **On Chainsaws and Display Cases**

Exhibiting Video Games Benjamin Beil | 159

## **MODIFICATIONS**

#### **Unpacking the Blackbox of 'Normal Gaming'**

A Sociomaterial Approach to Video Game Controllers and 'Disability' Markus Spöhrer | 187

#### **Being a Child Again Through Gameplay**

Playable Child Perspectives and the Sitting Simulator BACKSEAT Cordula Heithausen | 223

#### **Lego Level Up**

Game Literacy and Playful Materialities Hanns Christian Schmidt | 253

## **PIECES**

#### **Beyond Pawns and Meeples**

Material Meanings of Analog Game Figures Peter Podrez | 279

#### **Have We Left the Paperverse Yet?**

Maps, Boxes, and other Paper Objects as Imaginative Devices of Unfulfilled Desires in Early Gaming Michael A. Conrad | 315

#### **Keep the Innovation Rolling**

A Modern Board Game Review of Dice Usages and their Mechanisms Micael Sousa | 351

#### **Immateriality and Immortality**

Digital Toys in Video Games Emma Reay | 379

**Contributors** | 399

## **Preface and Acknowledgments**

#### BENJAMIN BEIL/GUNDOLF S. FREYERMUTH/

HANNS CHRISTIAN SCHMIDT/RAVEN RUSCH

Since the beginnings of human civilization, game culture and material culture have been closely linked. In the act of free play—*paidia*, according to Caillois1 —children, as well as adults, transform simple objects into multifaceted toys in an almost magical way. Analog forms of rule-based play—*ludus*2 —would hardly be conceivable without dice, cards, and game boards. Digital play is no less suffused with materiality: Games are not only mediated by technical interfaces, which we access via hardware and tangible peripherals. They are also subject to material hybridization, paratextual framing, and attempts of dematerialization and rematerialization. Of course, these contentious processes do not only affect digital games. For over three decades, they have marked the marginalization of industrial methods and modes in favor of digital ones, in production and consumption, in work and culture—via buzzwords and practices such as 'ubiquitous computing,' 'augmented reality,' and more recently, to an increasing extent, 'metaverse.'3

1 Caillois, Roger: *Man, Play and Games,* Urbana: University of Illinois Press 2001 (\*1958), p. 13.

2 Ibid.

3 All three concepts originated in the pioneering days of digital networking, around 1990, which also saw the emergence of the World Wide Web. Mark Weiser coined the term 'ubiquitous computing' that today we associate with the 'Internet of Things' (IoT) already in 1988. Four years later, Thomas Caudell, for the first time, described the fusion of the real and the virtual as 'augmented reality.' In the same year, 1992, Neal Stephenson published his novel *Snow Crash*, in which he evoked a virtual reality variant of such a fusion as the 'metaverse.'—For 'ubiquitous computing' see Weiser, Mark: "The Computer for the 21st Century," in: *Scientific American*, September 1991,

The work on this anthology started with the organization of a Game Studies Summit on "Playful Materialities" that took place at the Cologne Game Lab of TH Köln in July 2021 as part of the *11th Clash of Realities—International Conference on the Art, Technology, and Theory of Digital Games*. This volume documents the lectures given at the online summit and includes additional topics and perspectives. The contributions cover four major areas: "Places" explores locations and settings revealing the historical and artistic interdependence of the real and the virtual, the material and the immaterial; "Exhibits" focuses on practices and procedures employed in the material representation of digital gaming; "Modifications" traces examples of material pre-configurations of immaterial gaming experiences, augmenting adaptations as well as constricting controls; "Pieces," finally, addresses the material means of analog, digital and hybrid gaming, from pawns to puppets to pieces of paper.

The first section, "Places," opens with Gundolf S. Freyermuth's "Vegas, Disney, and the Metaverse: On the Material Anticipation of Virtual Worlds and Virtual Play in the Second Half of the 20th Century."4 The study investigates the dialectical interrelation of material and virtual realities, i.e., "the progressive replacement of analog hardware and material processes by digital software" since the 1950s and the "countertrend toward the rematerialization of digitized data and media works" since the 1980s.5 Drawing on Walter Benjamin's theorem of the aesthetic-technical anticipation of new media in 19th-century Paris, Freyermuth understands "the immersive and participatory experiences provided by Las Vegas' entertainment architecture" and ride attractions as a series of material anticipations of later virtual achievements and affordances in "graphics, simulation, games, AR, VR, the World Wide Web, and the Metaverse."6

The investigation of the 'future place' Las Vegas is followed by a contribution focusing on the contemporary digital auditory augmentation of a 'past place,' the

pp. 94-104; https://users.ece.utexas.edu/~ethomaz/courses/asr/papers/intro/21st-century.pdf. For 'augmented reality' see Caudell, Thomas, and David Mizell: "Augmented Reality: An Application of Heads-Up Display Technology to Manual Manufacturing Processes," in: *Proceedings of the Twenty-Fifth Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences*2 (1992), pp. 659-669, https://www.researchgate.net/publication/3510119\_Augmented\_reality\_An\_application\_of\_heads-up\_display\_techno logy\_to\_manual\_manufacturing\_processes. For 'metaverse' see Stephenson, Neal: *Snow Crash,* New York: Bantam Books 1992.

19th-century dropforge Hendrichs, preserved as an industry monument, in Solingen, North-Rhine Westphalia. In "Augmenting Materialities: A Case Study of Maschinenklangwerk," the authors Isabel Grünberg, Raven Rusch, and David Wildemann describe "the distinct materiality and mediality of augmented reality and discern its characteristics." Their goal is "to set new precedents for augmented reality both as a technology and as an artistic medium; to reinvigorate and expand its scholarly discussion, and to inspire innovation in the creation of augmented reality artifacts."7

The first section, "Places," thus ends with the artistic-theoretical reflection of an interactive sound installation in an industrial museum. Correspondingly, the second section, "Exhibits," begins with the exemplary analysis of another sound installation—a virtual one, contrasting the digital and the analog. In "Let's Play the Exhibition! Radiohead's KID A MNESIA Exhibition, Virtual Museums, and Games," Isabelle Hamm explores virtual exhibitions and their differences from analog experiences, asking: "what are the possibilities of a virtual exhibition? And what distinguishes it from a 'classic' exhibition? What kind of art is especially suitable for virtual exhibitions?"8 In trying to answer these questions, the author emphasizes the potential of the medial interconnections between the fields of art and games.

The particular challenges of exhibiting games are addressed in the next contribution, "To Craft a Game Arts Curators Kit: A Collective Record of How to Publicly Exhibit Video Games Around the Globe."9 Rene G. Cepeda and Chaz Evans document the genesis of this "collectively authored document that represents roughly a decade of practical experience producing game art exhibitions and public programs at museums and other cultural venues."10 The paper sums up the main themes of the GACK and explains the role of a curation of digital games in museums and galleries "that treats video games with the respect and specificity they deserve."11

The second section concludes with a short history of video game exhibitions. Benjamin Beil's "On Chainsaws and Display Cases: Exhibiting Video Games" takes as its starting point a peripheral device released for RESIDENT EVIL 4 in 2005—"a small chainsaw covered in blood splatter."12 Beil's historical-

7 In this volume pp. 99-119, here p. 99 f.

8 In this volume pp. 123-143, here p. 126.

9 In this volume pp. 145-157.

10 p. 145.

11 p. 155.

12 In this volume pp. 159-183.

theoretical investigation of the aesthetics and rhetorics of presenting games in museums and galleries pays particular attention to the widespread practice of both materially and functionally isolating digital artifacts like this exotic controller. The result is a surprising "praise of the display case": "By detaching an exhibition object from its everyday media environment—making it a semiophor—a form of historicity and especially a historical connection of hardware and software becomes visible."13

The engagement with the materiality of the chainsaw controller leads into the third section, "Modifications," which debates material arrangements preconfiguring the use and the perception of the virtual. The first contribution tackles the central issue of accessibility, the urgently needed adaptation of digital hardware to individual physical needs. In "Unpacking the Blackbox of 'Normal Gaming': A Sociomaterial Approach to Video Game Controllers and 'Disability,'" Markus Spöhrer examines the Microsoft Adaptive Controller as an experimental system for alternative bodily and technosensory configurations of digital gaming.14 Deconstructing "the black box of 'normal gaming' with game controllers," Spöhrer introduces—via a case study—an "alternative approach of 'en-/disabling' gaming practices."15

The analysis of the material conditions of gameplay—the demands that the diverse bodies of the players place on interfaces—is complemented in the following article with a discourse on the use of material qualities and constraints in designing digital games. In "Being a Child Again Through Gameplay: Playable Child Perspectives and the Sitting Simulator BACKSEAT," Cordula Heithausen describes her desire to create a realistic and relatable child perspective that invites identification. 16 In analyzing the few games that have already undertaken such efforts, the author identified three basic approaches—Dark, Playful, Blended—as well as four essential elements: "a childlike position, a childlike comprehension/ perception, a projection surface, and optionally the sensations of nostalgia and/or retro."17 Consequently, in creating her own game, she strongly emphasized the child's physical position in the virtual game space as well as "playful material(ities) that invite the player to interact and convey a narrative perspective in return."18

13 p. 177.

The third section concludes with a presentation of a game literacy workshop, which essentially unfolds its effects in interactive transitions between material and virtual play. Drawing on various approaches to understanding and teaching literacy, Hanns Christian Schmidt's "Lego Level Up: Game Literacy and Playful Materialities"19 outlines the practical and iterative development of procedures, software, and apparatuses—in particular, the editor game software A MAZE IN TILES and the augmented reality arcade cabinet DARIO'S BOX. With their help, children can acquire game literacy by becoming "'brickcoleurs' of their own computer game worlds by incorporating a playful materiality—literally brick by brick."20

These bricks lead on to the fourth and final section, "Pieces," which opens with a discussion of the quintessential 'piece' of analog games—board game figures. In a multifaceted approach, Peter Podrez's "Beyond Pawns and Meeples: Material Meanings of Analog Game Figures" explores the different forms, functions, and meanings of the materiality of analog game figures combining perspectives from analog and digital game research with approaches from actor-network theories and affordance theories. 21 Podrez advocates for game figures as a point of convergence of analog and digital gaming—as such, they are "highly interesting research objects of holistic game research: They offer the opportunity to rethink a media theory of play(ing) and to observe different figural forms, functions, and meanings in an analytical way."22

This point of convergence of playful analog material and the digital is continued in Michael Conrad's exploration of the diachronous history of paper and the digital computer. "Have We Left the Paperverse Yet? Maps, Boxes, and other Paper Objects as Imaginative Devices of Unfulfilled Desires in Early Gaming" takes readers on a journey through the history of early digital gaming and points out the numerous instances where paper has been the co-creative material partner. 23 The journey spans from the origins of paper in the Middle Ages to Alan Turing's universal machine to its application as a paratextual framework and material supplement for early digital games. Conrad concludes that "the medial identity of early games should be considered as open and fluid, material-immaterial hybrids."24

While Conrad leaves open the question of whether paper is disappearing from digital games and game design, Micael Sousa assures that another, far older,

19 In this volume pp. 253-276.

20 p. 256.

material game piece—the die—is alive and well. "Keep the Innovation Rolling: A Modern Board Game Review of Dice Usages and their Mechanisms" systematically lays out the material and aesthetic affordances of this ancient material as he proposes a new taxonomy of dice usages in modern board games. 25 By analyzing the online database of "Board Game Geek," he identifies different types of dice and what game mechanics these support while also classifying and identifying current innovations and trends in dice games. Sousa finds that the creative meld of semiotic meaning, mechanical significance, and aesthetic experience is the driver for innovation in modern dice games and that "successful applications of dice are the result of mixing their material dimensions with mechanisms that build engaging game experiences."26

The section "Pieces," and with it, this anthology, concludes with something that has been foreshadowed throughout—the complete dematerialization of the playful material in the digital game. With "Immateriality and Immortality: Digital Toys in Video Games," Emma Reay takes the puzzle-platform game UNRAVEL as a case study to explore how the "haptic-panoptic" quality of digital toys can locate players in the liminal space between material reality and immaterial imaginings.27 Drawing across Zoe Jaques' theorization of the 'spectrality' of stuffed animals and Katriina Heljakka's examination of toys as avatars, Reay argues that toylike protagonists in video games are intuitive vehicles to shuttle players between the realms of the physical and the digital. This volume began with the physical materialization of digital desires in the playscapes of Las Vegas and concludes with its inversion: the dematerialization of players as digital "ghosts"28 inhabiting virtual materialities and leaving behind "play-echoes."29

## **ACKNOWLEDGMENTS**

The anthology would not have been possible without the hard work of many people and the support of several sponsors. The *Clash of Realities* conference was planned by a Program Board chaired by Björn Bartholdy and Gundolf S. Freyermuth of the Cologne Game Lab (CGL). Cooperating institutions were the Institute for Media Culture and Theater of the University of Cologne, the Institute for

25 In this volume pp. 351-378.

26 p. 373.

Media Research and Media Pedagogy of TH Köln, and the ifs—internationale filmschule köln. The conference was financed through the generous support of TH Köln, Film und Medien Stiftung NRW, the City of Cologne, and Electronic Arts Germany. Our sincerest thanks go to these institutions and companies.

Both, the Game Studies Summit "Playing Materialities" and this volume, were planned and organized by Benjamin Beil, Gundolf S. Freyermuth, Hanns Christian Schmidt, and Raven Rusch. The summit owes much of its success to the extraordinary staff of the *Clash of Realities* conference, in particular, Vanessa Ossa, Judith Abend, Philipp Bojahr, Laura Frings, Isabelle Hamm, Alexandra Hühner, Susanne Kaiser, Su-Jin Song, and the many members of CGL student support groups as well as Mathias Mehr (CGL) who provided technical assistance. The present volume was tirelessly laid out by Raven Rusch. We thank them all for their extraordinary help!

We owe the deepest debt and gratitude, however, to the summit's speakers and presenters, as well as to the authors who wrote additional contributions.

**Places**

## **Vegas, Disney, and the Metaverse**

On the Material Anticipation of Virtual Worlds and Virtual Play in the Second Half of the 20th Century

GUNDOLF S. FREYERMUTH

For Edgar Pankow

In his technophilosophical investigation *Reality+: Virtual Worlds and the Problems of Philosophy,* David J. Chalmers discusses the historical skepticism about the human capacity to recognize material reality. Already in the centuries before our era, Chinese, Indian, and Greek thinkers independently raised whether humans could distinguish between what was real and what was an illusion. Chalmers outlines Zuanghzi's dream about being a butterfly, Narada's dream in which he lived an entire life as a woman, and Plato's allegory of the cave whose imprisoned inhabitants mistake distorted and selective reflections for reality. He interprets these doubts as examples of philosophical domains: "Knowledge: *How can Zhuangzi know whether or not he's dreaming?* Reality: *Is Narada's transformation real or illusory?* Value: *Can one lead a good life in Plato's cave?*"1 Classical philosophy's concerns about the perceptibility of material reality continued into the modern era, culminating in René Descartes's *Meditations on First Philosophy*. 2 With them, Chalmers writes, Descartes "set the agenda for centuries of Western

1 Chalmers, David John: *Reality+: Virtual Worlds and the Problems of Philosophy*, New York: W. W. Norton & Company 2022, loc. 362.

2 Descartes, René: *Meditations on First philosophy: In Which the Existence of God and Immortality of the Soul are Demonstrated*, Arlington, VA: Richer Resources Publications 2012 (\*1641).

philosophy to come. Descartes posed what I'll call the problem of the external world: How do you know anything at all about the reality outside you?"3

This questioning of the realness of the external reality, which seemed to consist primarily of material entities for millennia, received a new twist in the mid-20th century: Technical digitization and cultural digitalization promoted dematerialization—the progressive replacement of analog hardware and material processes by digital software. Since the 1950s, functional mathematization turned more and more materials, tools, and apparatuses of the material world into programs. For example, in media production, software replaced paper and typewriter; canvas, brush, and paint; celluloid, film processing laboratory, and cutting room. The material basis of this process of virtualization was the digital computer as a universal machine. Eventually, its hardware components and finally, the computer itself became subject to emulation as well: virtual RAM, virtual drives, virtual server, virtual machines. However, since the 1970s, a countertrend toward the rematerialization of digitized data and media works has also set in, including the implementation of desktop publishing, rewritable CD-ROMs and DVDs, and 3D printing.

In this paper, I examine how the course and consequences of both virtualization and dialectical or compensatory efforts of (re)materialization affect our understanding of what is real—or seems at least realistic. The focus is on the field of audiovisual storytelling, in particular the implications for the defining industrial medium film and the emergence of new audiovisions such as digital games and virtual reality.

Crucial for an understanding of the development of digital audiovisuality—or more generally: of the circumstances under which new media and their specific mechanics emerge—is perhaps an observation that Walter Benjamin made when looking back at the prehistory of cinema: Long before the new medium became technically possible, artistic experiments in other media, from painting to literature to innovative experimental apparatuses, attempted to create effects aesthetically that would later be inherent in film qua medium.4 This investigation traces a similar phenomenon: During the second half of the 20th century, a multitude of efforts can be observed to anticipate in other—old and new—media the effects of augmented and virtual reality, virtual worldbuilding, and virtual play that would become possible in the transmedium of software only decades later.

3 Chalmers: *Reality+*, loc. 147.

4 Benjamin, Walter: "Paris, the Capital of the Nineteenth Century," in: *The Arcades Project*, Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press 1999, pp. 3-13.—See the detailed discussion of Benjamin's theory of anticipation below pp. 20-29.

In the 1950s, when this development set in, all existing media were analog. Nota bene, aesthetic anticipations of the emerging digital transmedium's effects and future genres had to happen materially. Beyond the apparent parallels, this is also the reason for the drastic differences between the evolution of film and that of digital genres, especially games. The leap from the analog audiovisual medium of theater to the analog audiovisual medium of cinema took place in material reality: It consisted of the transition from live performances to the recording and subsequent editing of (audio-) visual play through industrial technology. In contrast, the leap from the industrial media of film and television to digital audiovisual media is characterized by the transition from material generation—in constructed settings and using human actors—to virtual and procedural generation in the transmedium of software. The shift from analog to digital audiovisuality thus seems more fundamental than the earlier one from mechanical audiovisuality (theater) to industrial audiovisuality (film) because this recent change presents the crucial issue of the relationship between material and virtual realities, their opposition as well as their intertwining.

I will proceed in nine steps. First, I will try to substantiate the hypothesis of aesthetic anticipation by discussing the theoretical foundations of the concept of future places in general and Las Vegas as a future place in particular (*I Understanding Anticipation: Non-Synchronism & Future Places*). In the second step, I position Las Vegas in the context and at the intersection of two media-historical changes that commenced in the late 1940s and early 1950s: the advent of immersive fantasy spaces, i.e., theme parks, and the conception of the digital transmedium, i.e., software. (*II Framing Las Vegas: Disney & Digital*).

In the following six chapters, I investigate the immersive and participatory experiences provided by Las Vegas's entertainment architecture. For each phase of the city's history, I will draw parallels to developments of and in the digital transmedium: graphics, simulation, games, AR, VR, the World Wide Web, and the Metaverse. The emphasis will be on the interplay between aesthetic desires and experiments on the one hand and evolving technologies and media on the other (*III Anticipating Augmented Realities: 1950s; IV Anticipating the Ultimate Display: 1960s; V Anticipating Virtual Worlds: 1990s; VI Anticipating Virtual Design:1990s; VII Anticipating Virtual Agency: 1990s; VIII Anticipating Virtual Play: 1990s.*)

I conclude by demonstrating how, at the turn of the 21st century, Las Vegas engaged in a virtualization of reality that foreshadowed the evolved modes of merging materiality and virtuality in our contemporary digital culture. (*IX Re-Framing Las Vegas: Anticipating the Metaverse*).

## **I UNDERSTANDING ANTICIPATION: NON-SYNCHRONISM & FUTURE PLACES**

There are many Paris. Some exist in reality, some only in media—from the Paris that Rick and Ilsa will always have5 to the Paris that Travis Henderson never found in Texas. 6 Since 1999, one such Paris can be visited in Nevada.7 The *Paris Las Vegas Hotel & Casino* is, naturally, not a one-to-one copy of the French capital. Built for almost \$800 million on the Strip, across from the faux Italian town of the *Bellagio Hotel & Casino* and down the street from the *New York-New York Hotel & Casino*, the architectural complex of the *Paris Las Vegas Hotel & Casino* offers an eclectic and condensed montage of landmark features: from the Arc de Triomphe, which is massive, but still a third smaller than the original, to the obligatory street bistros, from the Eiffel Tower, which stands 165 meters tall, but is only half the size of the original, to the Louvre-like façade to the extras in the lobby playing Parisians with baguettes and Basque berets. The arcade-like—and not all that gaudy—indoor-outdoor environments of the themed resort assemble essential components of the historical Paris that Walter Benjamin described in his *Arcades Project* and which at the same time Siegfried Kracauer conjured up in his underestimated *Jacques Offenbach and the Paris of His Time*. 8

On the one hand, it is somewhat ironic that Las Vegas, as the future place of the late 20th century, integrated an immersive replica of Paris, a future place of the 19th century. On the other hand, the entanglement of a long-ago future with elements of a future that at the end of the 20th century seemed to be imminent suggests that we can learn a few things about Las Vegas if we take a closer look at the concept of anticipation and future places.

The basic idea that the not-yet-experienced can be anticipated goes back to the enlightenment. In the *Critique of Pure Reason*, Immanuel Kant wrote: "We are really in possession of synthetic a priori cognition, as is established by the principles of understanding, which anticipate experience."9 Based on the principles of

5 CASABLANCA (USA 1942, D: Michael Curtiz)

6 PARIS, TEXAS (West Germany / France 1984, D: Wim Wenders)

7 Shoro, Mike: "Paris Las Vegas Turns 20," *Las Vegas Review Journal*, August 31, 2019, https://www.reviewjournal.com/business/casinos-gaming/paris-las-vegas-turn s-20-photos-1838639/

8 Kracauer, Siegfried: *Jacques Offenbach and the Paris of His Time*, New York, Cambridge, Mass.: Zone Books, Distributed by MIT Press 2002.

9 Kant, Immanuel: *Critique of Pure Reason*, Cambridge; New York: Cambridge University Press 1998 (\*1781), p. 655.

reason and the mind's fundamental ability to recognize patterns, we are able to give shape to the universe even before we can observe it. In the 19th century, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel continued the effort to realize future entities and events. In the lectures on aesthetics, he uses the germ-tree example to explain the relationship between concept and reality:

"In the germ [...] all determinations are contained, which the tree will show. [...] The germ is the concept, the tree the reality. [...] In the germ is contained all [...] as potential what will appear in the tree in practice."10

Thus, Hegel formulated the idealistic claim that concepts conceived by the mind are prior to reality. Both Kant's and Hegel's notions continued to have an impact in the 20th century.

In the early 1930s, when Las Vegas was a remote desert town of barely five thousand inhabitants, the philosopher Ernst Bloch, one of the four million residents of the German capital Berlin, developed the idea of the simultaneity of the non-simultaneous. "Not all people exist in the same Now," he stated, outlining his concept of "Ungleichzeitigkeit."11 Hard to translate, the term denotes temporal incommensurability, a non-synchronism or non-simultaneity among individuals, groups, and places. Its effect is to create a state of non-contemporaneity within and between societies and cultures. To illustrate his concept of people living at the same time and yet in different times, Bloch could have chosen the contrast of the backward rural town of Las Vegas and the advanced industrial metropolis Berlin: the not only geographical but also temporal distance between the two places.

From a similar perspective, Bloch's Berlin contemporary and soon fellow emigrant Walter Benjamin investigated such a temporal gap between an earlier avantgardist city and the traditional ways of life surrounding it. In his *Arcades Project*, he set out to describe how far ahead of the rest of France and the world Paris had been once. For the motto of his investigation, Benjamin adopted an insight of 19thcentury historian Jules Michelet: "Each epoch dreams the one to follow."12 Looking for such dreamy anticipations, he found that mainly three artistic achievements accompanied, augmented, and expedited the transformation of Paris from a regular city of its time to a future place:

10 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich: *Vorlesungen über die Ästhetik I, Die Idee und das Ideal. Hg. G. Lasson*, Leipzig: F. Meiner 1931, p. 157 (my translation).

11 Bloch, Ernst: "Nonsynchronism and the Obligation to Its Dialectics," *New German Critique* 11 (1977): pp. 22-38, here p. 22.

12 W. Benjamin: "Paris, the Capital of the Nineteenth Century," p. 4.

As a result, Benjamin came to define Paris as the "capital of the 19th century."16 The revolutionary urban design, flourishing art scene, and booming entertainment industry had a central vanishing point that was only to be reached in the 20th century: the sound film as the defining medium of industrial modernity. While working on his *Arcades Project*, Benjamin described this process in his seminal study on "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction," which made him one of the founders of media studies.17 The observation that artists—or rather their aesthetic works in traditional media—foreshadowed future media raised a crucial question: What kind of 'clairvoyance' allowed innovative art practices to point to aesthetic affordances of a medium that does not yet exist?

To answer this question, Benjamin proposed the theorem of anticipation. He observed that such 'dreamy clairvoyance' usually manifests itself in three areas: in technological and artistic experiments and changes in reception habits.

16 Ibid.

13 See in particular "Fourier, or the Arcades" and "Haussman, or the Barricades," in: Ibid., pp. 11-13.

14 See in particular "Daguerre, or the Panoramas," "Grandville, or the World Exhibitions," and "Baudelaire, or the Streets of Paris," in: Ibid., pp. 5-6, pp. 7-8, pp. 10-11.

15 Ibid.

17 Benjamin, Walter: "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction," in: *Illuminations. Essays and Reflections. Edited and With an Introduction by Hannah Arendt. Preface by Leon Wieseltier*, New York: Schocken Books 2007, pp. 217-252.

To better understand the mechanisms of these observed dreams of the future and provide a materialistic basis for his theorem of anticipation, Benjamin borrowed some of the tools from *The Interpretation of Dreams*21 and some of the basic assumptions of dialectical materialism. They led him to determine two origins and driving forces of Paris's advancement to a future place.

First, early on, the French capital offered a fusion of the traditional pre-industrial everyday life in a city of the mid-19th century with avant-gardist elements of (proto-)industrial work and consumption, particularly new technologies of transport and media of communication. The ensuing shock-like experiences of accelerated change impressed and altered the perceptual apparatus of the urban masses of Paris as well as hundreds of thousands of visitors from all over the world. Among them was a disproportionate number of intellectuals and artists who took it upon themselves to embrace, describe, analyze and shape the new way of life. In his analysis of their reactions, reflections, and works, Benjamin followed the pattern that Freud had established for dreams and daydreams. Through the mental processing of their experiences in the advanced Paris present—the day's residue of the dream—these artists gained the patterns and raw materials to anticipate, for example, technical aspects and effects of future media artistically. As a result, they managed to satisfy, with their reflections and aesthetic experiments, the novel

18 Ibid., p. 249 (Endnote 17).

19 Ibid., pp. 249-50 (Endnote 17).

20 Ibid., p. 250 (Endnote 17).

21 Freud, Sigmund: *The Interpretation of Dreams*, London: G. Allen & Company, Ltd. 1913.

entertainment desires arising from Paris's unique experiences and thus reinforced the city's path to the future.

With his Freudian analysis, Benjamin provided a materialistic basis for the intellectual and artistic ability to anticipate: individual perceptions of contemporary life that are sometimes more, sometimes less consciously processed. In the same direction of a materialistic grounding also goes the determination of the second driving force: material potentials—affordances—in existing technologies and media. In his artwork essay, Benjamin wrote, "Just as the illustrated newspaper virtually lay hidden within lithography, so the sound film was latent in photography."22 In comparison to Hegel's idealistic germ-tree-example—potential and realization—the sentence represents an apparent turn from biology to technology and media: from a hidden organic possibility to a material existence of elements of the future in the present.

In the following decades, similar notions of non-synchronism shaped the nascent discipline of futurology: the idea that the future which awaits the rest of humanity can already be observed in certain particularly advanced places and subcultures. Consequently, Robert Jungk titled his groundbreaking study on the future of humankind *Tomorrow Is Already Here.23* In the second half of the 20th century, it was not least futurological research that led to an increasing acceptance of the initially odd view that contemporaries and even locals can live in different times and often do so. "The future is already here—it's just not very evenly distributed," William Gibson quipped in 1999.24 By then, Las Vegas, with a population of 470 000 and almost 36 million tourists per year,25 had become a looking glass onto the future, particularly of architecture and popular entertainment like musicals,

22 Benjamin, Walter: *The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility, and Other Writings on Media*, Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press 2008, p. 21.—The translation in *Illuminations* is less clear: "Just as lithography virtually implied the illustrated newspaper, so did photography foreshadow the sound film." W. Benjamin: "The Work of Art," p. 219.

23 Jungk, Robert: *Tomorrow is Already Here: Scenes from a Man-Made World*, London: R. Hart-Davis 1954.—The title of the German edition *Die Zukunft hat schon begonnen* translates: "The future has already begun."

24 Gibson, William: "Talk of the Nation: The Science in Science Fiction," *National Public Radio* (Interview), November 30, 1999, Citation 11:50 min., http://www.npr.o rg/templates/story/story.php?storyId=1067220

25 N.N.: "Number of Visitors to Las Vegas in the United States from 2000 to 2019," 2020, https://www.statista.com/statistics/221042/visitors-to-las-vegas/

comedic and erotic stage shows, and, of course, gambling and sexual services but also technology and consumerism in general.

To learn from Las Vegas, I will adopt Benjamin's model of the effects of technological and social change on the human perceptual apparatus and the resulting development of new media to our digital present. In addition, I will supplement and augment this approach with Neal Stephenson's more recent concept of "hieroglyphic" anticipation. Writing about Science Fiction, Stephenson claims that this genre—in novels, movies, games, or other media—can do more than encourage innovation. Science Fiction can supply enchanted blueprints, "hieroglyphs of the future": "a plausible, fully thought-out picture of an alternate reality in which some sort of compelling innovation has taken place."26 I will apply Stephenson's perspective on Science Fiction to other forms of artistic expression, namely the architecture and attractions of Las Vegas.

In modern history, there are, undoubtedly, numerous examples of cities that rose to prominence because they were, as they say, a little ahead of their time: from Venice and Florence in the Renaissance to Manchester, London, and Paris in the 19th century to Vienna during the Fin de Siècle to Berlin in the 1920s. These places developed and implemented nascent technologies first, accompanied by a concentration of capital and the rise of new classes. Together with innovative forms of work and everyday life, unique aesthetic needs emerged. They, in turn, resulted in new modes of aesthetic representation and perception. I propose understanding parts of the American West as such a future place in the second half of the 20th century. 27

The rise of California and its neighboring states to such a—scattered-networked, i.e., post-urban—'suburb of the 20th century' already began at the time of the second industrial revolution, in the early 1920s, when the mild climate attracted two of the technologically and aesthetically most modern sectors, the aircraft and film industries. During the Second World War, the influx of high-tech companies and research institutes intensified. The region fully transformed into a laboratory of the future, whose basic inventions and products dominated globally

26 Stephenson, Neal: "Innovation Starvation," *Wired*, October 27, 2011, https://www.wi red.com/2011/10/stephenson-innovation-starvation/

27 The parallels between the Paris of the early industrial era and the American West of the early digital era were first described by me in 1996. See Freyermuth, Gundolf S.: *Cyberland: Eine Führung durch den High-Tech-Underground*, Berlin: Rowohlt 1996, pp. 22 ff.

in the wake of the semiconductor and microprocessor revolution.28 Between the late 1940s and the end of the century, in the American West, new technologies and types of urbanity, modern lifestyles, and media developed that, with some delay, took over the rest of the world. The PC, its operating systems and programs, the design of the chips, input and output devices such as the computer mouse and laser writer, and the hardware and software underlying global networking were mainly West Coast innovations. At the turn of the century, California high-tech companies dominated the world market for IT products relatively unchallenged.29 The region's economic power was correspondingly high. Based on its gross national product, California alone would have ranked amongst the nation-states fifth in 2000, just behind Great Britain and ahead of France.30

The economic importance of digital technology was matched by its regional use, i.e., by the development of new digital forms of work and life. In the quartercentury from the dawn of the PC to the turn of the century, Americans, on average, implemented and used digital means of production and communication more intensively than the rest of humanity. As late as the mid-1990s, 40 percent of all PCs and the majority of digital networks were located in the United States.31 Statistically, computer use and networking were nowhere as high as on the West Coast.32

28 In the 1950s, Silicon Valley was only the second American high-tech region after the area along Route 128. Both centers had formed around top universities: Stanford in the west, MIT in the east. Cf. Campbell-Kelly, Martin and William Aspray: *Computer: A History of the Information Machine*, New York: Basic Books 1996, p. 123.

In this essay, I will limit myself to one vertex of the geographical triangle formed by Los Angeles in the South, San Francisco in the North, and Las Vegas in the East. Within this innovative economic zone, Las Vegas, the so-called "sin city," took on the function that red-light districts had served in the industrial metropolises of the 19th century: To the classes that rose with the latest technology, the city offered, as Paris did once, relief by satisfying traditional entertainment needs—from gambling to prostitution—as well as novel desires resulting from the social and cultural experiences of post-industrialization and digitalization.

My claim of Las Vegas as a future place is, of course, not original. The unique role of this city has been noted many times in various ways and by multiple authors, most famously in the late 1960s by Robert Venturi, Denise Scott Brown, and Steven Izenour in their seminal study *Learning from Las Vegas*. 33 Venturi was also among the first to notice the cutting-edge role of the city after its demolition and reconstruction in the 1990s. 34 Another was Ada Louise Huxtable. In 1997, the long-time architecture critic of *The New York Times* described Las Vegas as "an urban design frontier where extraordinary things are happening."35 Three years later, I reported after an extended visit:

"Las Vegas is no longer a city in the modern sense. Like nowhere else, attempts are being made here to produce in analog form what virtual reality technologies promise, but the current state of technology cannot yet deliver in satisfactory quality: the experience of distant spaces or imaginary worlds, as well as myths and fictions that can be entered and allow participation. In this respect, all Las Vegas is a Fata Morgana, an aesthetic illusion, a utopian model that heralds both more advanced virtualities and augmented post-realities of the digital era."36

Shim, Richard: "West Coast Cities Tops in Wireless," *CNET News.com*, March 3, 2003.

Later in the same year, Eckhardt Schmidt completed a documentary film entitled LAS VEGAS—THE FIRST CITY OF THE 21ST CENTURY. An online summary states: "Las Vegas, the city of players and fantasists, mutated into a city of realized virtual realities."37 In 2007, Laura Bieger analyzed the "aesthetics of immersion" of Las Vegas, noting that the city is a "pioneer of paradigmatic cultural developments,"38 namely the "strategic cross-fading of world and image, inviting us to a physical immersion in the reality they have generated."39

To understand the cultural function of Las Vegas's unique urbanity, Bieger also refers to a concept that Michel Foucault developed in the late 1960s. In his exploration of spaces opposing the ordinary environments of social life, Foucault identified, on the one hand, utopian visions: "Utopias are sites with no real place."40 And on the other hand, places that actually exist, but to a certain extent outside everyday reality. Foucault called such places "heterotopias" and defined them as "counter-sites," "a kind of effectively enacted utopia."41 Within the multiplicity of heterotopic spaces, he distinguished "two extreme poles": spaces of illusion—such as theater and cinema, museum and library—and spaces of compensation. "[T]heir role is to create a space that is other, another real space, as perfect, as meticulous, as well arranged as ours is messy, ill constructed, and jumbled."42 Laura Bieger suggests that Las Vegas should be regarded as such a heterotopia as it contains "hybrid forms between utopian (i.e., unreal) and real space."43

Thus, the essential question of my investigation of Las Vegas as a future place is: What exactly are the mechanisms of its dream-like historical anticipations (Benjamin), its creation of future-inspiring hieroglyphs (Stephenson), and its realization of playful immersive heterotopic spaces (Foucault)?

37 LAS VEGAS—DIE ERSTE STADT DES 21. JAHRHUNDERTS (Germany 2000, D: Eckhardt Schmidt); summary: N.N.: "Las Vegas—die erste Stadt des 21. Jahrhunderts," *Moviepilot*, no date, https://www.moviepilot.de/movies/las-vegas-die-erste-stadt-des-21-jahrhunderts (my translation).

38 Bieger, Laura: *Ästhetik der Immersion. Raum-Erleben zwischen Welt und Bild. Las Vegas, Washington und die White City*, Bielefeld: transcript 2007, p. 10 (my translation).

The focus is on media anticipations. In all future places of the modern era, the adoption of new media played an essential role. In the Renaissance, the formative new media were perspective painting and the picture-frame stage. In the industrial 19th century, the formative new media were the daily newspaper, photography, stereoscopy, and operetta. In the second half of the 20th century, the aesthetics of Las Vegas and its entertainment evolved under the influence of the industrial media of (Hollywood) film, television, and theme parks, as well as in temporal parallel to the emerging digital transmedium and networked transmedia storytelling, namely in games, augmented reality (AR), and virtual reality (VR).

My central assumption is that since the 1950s, Las Vegas's entertainment sought to offer locally and in material reality—in the form of hardware—what only later digital technology could provide globally and virtually—in the form of software.

### **II FRAMING LAS VEGAS: DISNEY & DIGITAL**

The desire to experience worlds other than one's own everyday life, immersion in counter-worlds, by no means emerged only at the end of the industrial era. "Reality," says VR pioneer Brenda Laurel, "has always been too small for the human imagination."44 The history of aesthetic immersion—in rite and religion, bourgeois education, art, politics, and ultimately entertainment—thus documents the state of civilization and, in particular, humanity's relationship to its tools of production, transportation, and communication.

Mind-expanding drugs offered the earliest escapes into alternative worlds. In a religious context, they created out-of-body experiences that, from today's perspective, evoke virtual reality experiences. The close connection between drug culture and high-tech culture, especially during the crucial decades of digitization in the American West, proves the persistence of the millennial fascination with psychedelic immersion. However, only the manifestation of counter-worldly experiences within a collectively perceivable reality could guarantee their sameness and repeatability. At the beginning of such staging were cave ceremonies:

"Youngsters were brought into the darkness of painted caves, where stories were told, images and songs were revealed in precise sequence, and the youths became immersed in their

44 Cited after McCarthy, Susan: "Techno-Soaps and Virtual Theater: Brenda Laurel Can Blow Anything Up," *Wired*, May/June, 1993, http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/ 1.02/brenda.html

coming-of-age ceremonies. Only by shutting out the rest of the world and immersing themselves in this separate space could the learning occur that changed a child into an adult."45

With the development of advanced civilizations, artisan-made environments replaced artistically designed caves: Temples and gardens, palaces and parks, wonders of the world, and cathedrals.

With the rise of craft culture, the visual and performing arts came into play in decorating and displaying these religious and secular spaces of experience beyond everyday life. Their works and actions guided by rules materialized the fleeting fantasies and dreams previously initiated only by drugs or rites. Sculptures, sports and votive plays, and finally, the theater as it emerged in Greece in the fifth century B.C.E., opened up a view of worlds beyond everyday life, indeed beyond life itself, that was both more reliable and intersubjective in its aesthetic quality. The operators of the Roman Colosseum provided the most spectacular—and until the industrialization of the arts never again achieved—playful staging. As always in the mechanical epoch, biological power provided what was later achieved in a more 'humane' way by utilizing machines. In the nearly 50-meter-high entertainment structure, wooden, slave-operated machinery of 20 moving platforms and 28 smaller elevators 'magically' lifted the fighters, beasts of prey, and scenery into the arena.

The early modern era then largely dispensed with animal and human sacrifice and introduced perspective illusionism into the (audio-) visual media. The mathematical-technical procedures of perspective theory reliably projected real 3D relationships onto a 2D canvas, simultaneously eliminating and simulating actual spatiality. The model of perspective paintings is still followed today by picture frame stages, cinema screens, and the monitors of television sets or computers. They all offer framed views of worlds outside the reality of our lives. The reception practice common to these modern audiovisual media can be subsumed under the concept of the window view.46

What lies beyond a window can neither be entered nor manipulated, however. This reduction in the experience of alternative visual and audiovisual realities to passive viewing, as it characterized the representative media of high and mass

45 Pimentel, Ken and Kevin Teixeira: *Virtual Reality: Through the New Looking Glass*, New York: Intel/McGraw-Hill 1993, p. 15.

46 On the significance of the window view in modern media history see Freyermuth, Gundolf S.: "From Analog to Digital Image Space: Towards a Historical Theory of Immersion," in: *Immersion in the Arts and Media*, ed. Burcu Dogramaci and Fabienne Liptay, Amsterdam: Rodopi 2015, 165-203.

culture for centuries, continuously awakened a desire for holistic representation and immersive use. Perspective boxes and chambers of wonder, panoramas, dioramas, and phantasmagorias experimented with deconstructing and overcoming the window view. The central high-cultural aspiration for more immersive experiences than the pre-industrial media could offer sought the "Gesamtkunstwerk," the total work of art. Its realization seemed conceivable to contemporaries only by bundling the existing media or arts. In this respect, almost all theorists of the Gesamtkunstwerk—from Wilhelm Heinse and Christoph Willibald Gluck to Herder, Novalis, and E.T.A. Hoffmann to Richard Wagner—propagated its realization as a heightening of opera's performance. Wagner finally theoretically conceived the longed-for "work of art of the future" around the middle of the 19th century. 47 After 1876, he brought it to the Bayreuth stage of illusion, which was driven by steam power and also otherwise characterized by industrial technology.

Wagner's operas, however, could not satisfy the utopian longings for more immersive media any more than film and television could in the 20th century. Parallel to their breakthrough as mass media, new media utopias as well as dystopian visions emerged that anticipated but feared such increased immersion. For example, in 1932, when the medium of sound film was only a few years old, Aldous Huxley described the evolution of movies into more immersive "feelies" in his dystopian *Brave New World*. 48 In 1940, Argentine writer Adolfo Bioy Casares, in the novel *The Invention of Morel*, designed a revolutionary imaging method that could populate the world with realistic three-dimensional copies of long-deceased people.49 And in 1945, the French film critic Andre Bazin wrote about the path of cinema towards the 'Gesamtkunstwerk,' the "total cinema:" "a total and complete representation of reality […] the reconstruction of a perfect illusion of the outside world in sound, color, and relief […]."50

By this time, American movie magnate Walt Disney had long since decided to create a new medium that was more immersive than any existing offering. The initial trigger was Disney's threefold dissatisfaction with industrial modernity. First, he did not accept the medial limitations of sound film, especially its commitment to two-dimensional photorealism. Just as around the middle of the 19th

47 Wagner, Richard: *Das Kunstwerk der Zukunft*, Leipzig: O. Wigand 1850.

48 Huxley, Aldous: *Brave New World*, Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, Doran & Company, Inc. 1932.

49 Bioy Casares, Adolfo: *The Invention of Morel*, New York: New York Review Books 2003 (\*1940).

50 Bazin, André: "The Myth of Total Cinema," in: *What Is Cinema?*, Berkeley: University of California Press 1967-1971 (\*1946), pp. 23-27.

century, Richard Wagner sought to overcome what he perceived as the medial weaknesses of opera by creating total works of art, so one hundred years later, Disney wanted to transcend the medial affordances of sound film in favor of a multisensory cinematic experience. With his fundamental decision in favor of animation, Disney had already opposed the limitations of industrial reproduction technology. In its artistic content and technical process, animated film art overruled industrial automatisms by recourse to manual manipulations. In this way, Disney's studio laboriously evaded the constraint of having to stage the real thing in real-time before the camera's eye. "The painstaking art of animation was, after all, the art of perfecting the world."51 With the animated film, Disney had gained a freedom of design that only much later digital image generation was to grant in the photorealistic reproduction of live-action. But even the most fantastic animated films, like everything else captured on celluloid, remained medially flat. Animated movies could not fulfill Disney's aesthetic ideal because he was aspiring to three-dimensional lifelikeness: "a cartoon that immerses the audience."52

Second, as both a father and an entertainment entrepreneur, Disney was dissatisfied with what industrial amusement parks offered. In his eyes, they prevented a satisfying experience both by the primitive aesthetic form of their individual attractions and the lack of an overall artistic conception. Therefore, Disney divided his park into distinct areas—*Adventureland*, *Frontierland*, *Fantasyland*, *Tomorrowland*, and *Main Street USA*—that were self-contained and coherent in design, i.e., had a unifying 'theme.'53 As aesthetic models served him a variety of historical entertainment forms, including the parks of early modern Europe and the industrial genre of world's fairs.54

53 Ibid.

51 Marling, Karal Ann: "Imagineering the Disney Theme Parks," in: *Designing Disney's Theme Parks: The Architecture of Reassurance*, ed. Karal Ann Marling, Montréal, Paris: New York: Flammarion 1997, pp. 29-176, here p. 33.

52 Thomas, Bob: *Walt Disney: An American Original*, New York, N.Y.: Hyperion 1994, p. 11. Cited after Pine, B. Joseph and James H. Gilmore: *The Experience Economy: Work is Theatre & Every Business a Stage*, Boston: Harvard Business School Press 1999, p. 47.

54 See Harris, Neil: "Expository Expositions. Preparing for the Theme Parks," in: *Designing Disney's Theme Parks: The Architecture of Reassurance*, ed. Karal Ann Marling, Montréal, Paris, New York: Flammarion 1997, pp. 19-27; Tuan, Yi-Fu with Steven D. Hoelscher: "Disneyland: Its Place in World Culture," Ibid., pp. 191-198. Also Gottdiener, Mark: *The Theming of America: Dreams, Visions, and Commercial Spaces*, Boulder Colo.: Westview Press 1997, p. 38.

Third, in the sprawling car suburbs of Southern California, Disney missed the qualities of traditional urban environments. His goal was to supplement the unloved but irreversible suburbanization with more human environments that were both quantitatively better manageable and qualitatively better designed. The means to this end seemed to be entertainment architecture because fantasy spaces, such as those offered for millennia by wonders of the world, magnificent castles, or spectacular houses of faith, were materialized structures of desire. They stabilized experiences and stimulated behaviors by building them up, so to speak. As Mark Gottdiener writes of Disney's parks, the architecture itself became "a form of entertainment. Each structure provides its own fantasy. The park itself is architecture that entertains."55

Disney's first theme park, Disneyland, which opened in a Los Angeles suburb, thus initiated the development of a new medium comparable in both its historical function and cultural impact to the mechanical stage and industrial cinema. Within a few decades, it was to become the "most popular attraction on the earth."56 By the end of the century, theme parks were attracting some 550 million visitors per year worldwide, including some 226 million in the United States alone.57 US theme park revenues were \$9 billion per year around 2000, higher than the roughly \$7.7 billion earned at the US box office.58

Structurally, the theme park concept resulted from years of research into overcoming these shortcomings of modernism—of film, entertainment parks, and urbanism. Disneyland killed all three birds with one stone. As the world's first theme park, it made the 2D fantasy worlds of feature films and TV shows accessible and experienceable. "What he [Disney] was doing in his theme parks was producing his cartoon images in three dimensions."59 Theme parks replaced watching with walking and screens with spaces turning the passively-seated audience of cinema and TV into active 'guests' who no longer looked at 2D fictions but instead entered into 3D environments and experienced cinematic narrations in a multisensory way.

55 M. Gottdiener: *The Theming of America*, p. 114.

56 Ibid., p. 108.

57 Tagliabue, John: "Giving Theme Parks a Whirl; Europeans Warm to an American-Style Entertainment," *The New York Times*, September 2, 2000.

58 For U.S. theme park revenues, cf. White, LaTrina: "Theme Parks With History Entice Eclectic Fun Seekers," *CNN.com*, July 14, 2003, http://www.cnn.com/2003/TRAV EL/07/01/sprj.st03.theme.parks/.—For box office figures, cf. e.g. http://www.boxofficemojo.com/yearly/

59 Blume, Mary: "Disney Conquers Another World: Design," *International Herald Tribune*, September 27, 1997.

*Top left: Promotional Prospectus of Disneyland, 1953; Top Right: Opening Day at Disneyland, July 17, 1955; Middle: Promotional Aerial Shot of Disneyland, 1961;Bottom Left and Right: Disneyland Attractions in the 1950s*

Sources: Promotional Disney Material and Private Photographs by Unknown Visitors

Further, Disneyland revolutionized the entertainment park genre. Its attractions no longer positioned the audience in front of theatrical or historical stages—as, for example, the Prater's grotto ride still did—to entertain them with a leisurely series of static 'pictures' or tableaus. Instead, Disneyland immersed its guests in a rapid succession of thematically stylized scenes, arranged in a cinematic manner and animated by human actors or animatronic puppets. Finally, Disneyland provided walkable 'streets' and 'lands' as architectural antidotes to the non-urban and carcentric environments of the American West. "Disneyland was created to fill a vacuum […] that was uniquely regional […] a deep need […] for a human-scale, pedestrian experience of immersion in a three-dimensional narrative."60

*Left: Walt Disney and Animator and Collaborator John Hench with the Map of Disneyland, Mid-1950s; right: Walt Disney at the Gate to Adventureland, Late 1950s*

Source: Promotional Disney Photographs

For all three purposes, Walt Disney and his collaborators used the means they knew, the analog simulation processes developed in Hollywood and the California aerospace industry: in particular, methods and tricks of set design, inter alia, forced perspective, the combination of partial scale change and spatial compression, or the so-called wienie, a purposefully set visual cue that directed reception,

60 Pearce, Celia: "Narrative Environments: From Disneyland to World of Warcraft," in: *Space Time Play: Computer Games, Architecture and Urbanism—The Next Level*, ed. Friedrich von Borries, Steffen P. Walz, and Matthias Böttger, Basel: Birkhäuser 2007, pp. 200-205, here p. 201.

as well as motion platforms, electronic control and automation of visual and acoustic effects. 61 To that extent, the theme park was a child of cinema, though a rebellious one that broke media boundaries with its turn to three-dimensionality. The second parent, however, was television with its principle of programming. "Television […] provided the physical structure for the park. The show was organized around a menu of themes, each one corresponding to a part of the park, or to a sprawling roster of 'lands' […]."62 In sum, Karal Ann Marling describes the transformation of screenplays and movies, and TV shows into a park as a fusion of fiction and architecture—urban environmental storytelling. "At Disneyland, Walt translated that verbal and pictorial narrative into a material, spatial dimension. He made a city, or a series of cities, that told a story."63

In the history of media, the invention of the theme park stands at the intersection of two trajectories. On the one hand, the new medium responded to the same dissatisfaction with the state of industrial reproduction technology that led Bazin to call for the "total cinema" and simultaneously instigated a variety of elaborate technical experiments in the 1950s—from innovative wide-screen formats to 3D films to Mort Heilig's *Sensorama*. Walt Disney's longing for immersive experiences is, therefore, part of cinema's artistic crisis that led to the postindustrialization of the media landscape: to the "new triumvirate of television, wide-screen cinema, and Disneyland."64

On the other hand, the new medium also points to the near future, the advent and popularization of an entirely new mediality. By allowing their 'guests' to navigate cinematic narratives interactively, theme park attractions simulated experiences that could not be achieved otherwise, or only at some risk or considerable cost. The medium materially contrived with mechanical-electronic means 'safe' immersive experiences of 'dangerous' events that a few decades later, digital media and, in particular, digital simulations and digital games were to provide virtually. The new medium of theme park entertainment thus occupied an intermediate position between analog audiovisuality (theater, cinema, television) and digital audiovisuality (digital film, digital games, augmented and virtual reality).

61 Cf. e.g. the summary in M. Blume: "Disney Conquers Another World: Design."

62 K. Marling: "Imagineering the Disney Theme Parks," p. 73.

63 Ibid., here p. 85.

64 Huhtamo, Erkki: "Encapsulated Bodies in Motion: Simulators and the Quest for Total Immersion," in: *Critical Issues in Electronic Media*, ed. Simon Penny, Albany: State University of New York Press 1995, pp. 159-186, p. 162.—Tellingly, Disneyland presented the first 360-degree projection system *Circle-Vision 360°* in 1955.

The latter's development started in the same period, the years at the end and after World War II, and in parallel to the development of the theme park genre as well as the rise of Las Vegas to an entertainment metropolis. 65 Alan Turing had already conceived the purely theoretical model of a universal computing machine in 1936.66 Yet it was not until 1945 that John von Neumann, who had co-supervised Turing's dissertation, succeeded in its technological-practical application by developing the model of a stored-program computer, the so-called Von Neumann Architecture.67 Its main innovation was separating the material machine and its mathematical control. This step created the dualism of what today is hard- and software, more precisely: the software that we call programs.68

Three years later, Claude Elwood Shannon proposed a method for digitizing communicative processes and cultural artifacts. 69 The adequate transfer of analog qualities and functions into mathematical values supplied the mathematical universal machine with its universal bit material: texts, sounds, images, etc.—the software we call files. In addition, the digital computer, which initially used cathode-ray tubes to perform its switching, also found a radically new hardware basis in 1948: The invention of the transistor by Bill Shockley et al. enabled a steady process of performance enhancement, miniaturization, and cost reduction. It transformed digital machines from large-scale industrial technology for collective and professional use (mainframes, minicomputers, microcomputers, etc.) into rela-

65 See below Chapter III.

66 Turing, Alan: "On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem," *Proceedings of the London Mathematical Society* ser. 2. vol. 42 (1936-7), pp. 230-265; corrections, Ibid, vol 43 (1937) pp. 544-546, http://www.abelard.org/tu rpap2/tp2-ie.asp

67 Neumann, John von: "First Draft of a Report on the EDVAC," (1945), https://web.mit. edu/STS.035/www/PDFs/edvac.pdf

68 The term software itself, however, was not coined until 13 years later. Cf. Leonhardt, David: "John Tukey, 85, Statistician; Coined the Word 'Software,'" *The New York Times*, July 28, 2000, http://www.nytimes.com/2000/07/28/us/john-tukey-85-statisti cian-coined-the-word-software.html

69 Shannon, Claude Elwood: "A Mathematical Theory of Communication." Reprinted with corrections from *The Bell System Technical Journal*, Vol. 27, pp. 379-423, 623- 656, July, October (1948), http://people.math.harvard.edu/~ctm/home/text/others/ shannon/entropy/entropy.pdf

tively affordable private devices, which could also be used playfully for entertainment purposes (PCs, consoles, handhelds, smartphones, smartwatches).70

What categorically distinguishes the digital computer from all analog machines is its universality—the fact that the same (hardware) apparatus, through different (software) controls, can process in multiple ways anything that can be digitized: numbers, texts, sounds, still and moving images, and so on. Analog machines, by contrast, were and are always special machines, limited to specific tasks. With these three innovations, the technological foundations of digital culture were laid at the end of the 1940s—even if their technical realization was to take decades.

The period around 1950 also constitutes a key period because, beyond the technological basics, new ways of cultural networking and knowledge generation and transfer were imagined. Besides Shannon's mathematical theory of information, four publications, in particular, represent this beginning: Vannevar Bush's "As We May Think" (1945)71— the vision of a networked personal information device and, at the same time, the origin of software crosslinking and thus of the World Wide Web; Arthur C. Clarke's "Extraterrestrial Relays" (1945)72—the onset of global networking and hence the establishment of planetary real-time communication; Alan Turings' "Computing Machinery and Intelligence"73 —the concept of Artificial Intelligence; James D. Watson's and F. H. C. Crick's "A Structure for Deoxyribose Nucleic Acid" (1953)74—the insight into the control of biological life by a decipherable code and thus the beginning of both gene manipulation and a digital image of homo sapiens, which understands our species as a programmed and thus reprogrammable life form.

In their entirety, these seven conceptions between 1945 and 1953 triggered a fundamental thrust of progress. At first, the potential of digitization was realized

70 On the dialectical relatedness of Shockley's and Shannon's work at Bell Laboratories, cf. e.g. Naughton, John: *A Brief History of the Future: The Origins of the Internet*, London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson 1999, p. 63.

71 Bush, Vannevar: "As We May Think," *The Atlantic Monthly*, July, 1945, http://ww w.theatlantic.com/unbound/flashbks/computer/bushf.htm

72 Clarke, Arthur C.: "Extraterrestial Relays," *Wireless World* (October, 1945), pp. 305- 308, http://www.lsi.usp.br/~rbianchi/clarke/ACC.ETRelays.html

73 Turing, Alan: "Computing Machinery and Intelligence," *Mind*, no. 59 (1950), pp. 433-460, http://www.loebner.net/Prizef/TuringArticle.html

74 Watson, James D. and F.H.C. Cricks: "A Structure for Deoxyribose Nucleic Acid," *Nature*, April 2, 1953, p. 737, http://biocrs.biomed.brown.edu/Books/Chapters/Ch%2 08/DH-Paper.html

technologically and economically primarily in the American West, in the region south of the Bay Area, which has been called "Silicon Valley" since the early 1970s precisely because of its rise in the wake of the silicon transistor to a global hub for technological innovation.

The first application of digital technology for entertainment purposes also happened in California, from George Lucas' unique special effects company Industrial Light and Magic in Marin County north of San Francisco to the countless start-ups of game companies in Silicon Valley—Atari, Activision, Blizzard, Electronic Arts, etc.—to the digitization of film production in the direct vicinity of Hollywood. The new genre of the theme park, which also emerged in California during this period of incipient digitalization and essentially anticipated virtual worlds, found its most forceful urban expression, however, just across the California border in Las Vegas, Nevada. Since the 1950s, the desert town rose to become the gambling and entertainment center of the American West—while also hosting the CES, the world's most influential consumer electronics trade show, where digital innovations have been presented annually for decades, from the first computer graphics to the first virtual reality apparatuses to the current attempts to realize the Metaverse.75

*Las Vegas in the 1940s: The Construction of El Rancho Hotel and Casino Along the Las Vegas Strip*

Source: Historic Aerial Photograph

75 The first Las Vegas CES was held in 1978. Cf. June, Laura and David Peirce: "Incredible Photos From The CES Vault: 1967 to 2014," *The Verge*, January 4, 2013, https://www.theverge.com/2013/1/4/3828848/ces-photo-history

*El Rancho Hotel and Casino in the Late 1940s*

Source: Contemporary Promotional Postcard

### **III ANTICIPATING AUGMENTED REALITIES: 1950S**

The transformation of Las Vegas from a small town of no particular importance to a future place visited and experienced every year by millions of people from all over the world happened in four stages. During the first decades of the 20th century, Las Vegas barely existed. In 1905, when a railway line made it possible to lure players into the desert oasis, a few fake 'Western' saloons, including casinos, were built. They drew their inspiration from the rustic tradition of the frontier, which by then was already obsolete. For over 40 years, little changed in these modest attempts to enhance the experience of gambling through a rudimentary fictionalization. Only with the end of World War II did the second phase begin. It brought the Mafia and modernity to Las Vegas.

As the first of the more 'cosmopolitan' casino hotels, the *Flamingo* opened in 1946 on the Las Vegas Strip, then a rural highway a little more than four miles long outside the actual city limits. Others followed, most famously, the *Sahara* (1952), *The Sands* (1952), *The Dunes* (1955), and the *Stardust* (1958). The bare concrete that characterized these modern buildings was, of course, contrary to the central business objective: a hallucination of the senses as well as the mind that made the visitors forget everyday life and immerse themselves in gambling. The modern architecture that was the rule in the industrial cities of the mid-20th-century, impoverished in themes and signs, had to be adapted to the specific purposes of Las Vegas. This was achieved through electronic embellishment.

*Las Vegas in the 1950s and 1960s; Top Left: Flamingo Hotel and Casino; Top Middle: Sands Hotel and Casino; Top Right: Stardust Hotel and Casino; Middle Left: Sahara Hotel and Casino; Middle Right: Design Study of the Dunes Hotel and Casino; Bottom: The Las Vegas Strip in the 1960s*

Sources: Contemporary Promotional Photographs and Postcards

Soon a characteristic of the booming town became the contrast between its 'normal' sight of unadorned buildings in the glaring desert sun and their lavish neon decoration. After sunset, it displayed gigantic bubbling waterfalls, swirling candycolored hula hoop tires, bikini contours, and thousands of other flickering largerthan-life signs. In its day-night dualism, Las Vegas's neon or neo-modernism was reminiscent—quite in the sense of the inventors—of the landscapes of dreams charged with overdetermined meanings.76

The mixture of illusion and functionality of this hitherto unknown mix of modernist architecture and neon signage fascinated the contemporaries. The top-grossing musical film VIVA LAS VEGAS and particularly Elvis Presley's title song captured this excitement.77 In the same year, *New Journalism* reporter Tom Wolfe eloquently captured neon modernism's sensory effect in his reportage "Las Vegas (What?) Las Vegas (Can't hear you! Too noisy) Las Vegas!!!."78 One visitor named Raymond he portrayed as "a good example of the marvelous impact Las Vegas has on the senses":79

"He had been rolling up and down the incredible electric-sign gauntlet of Las Vegas' Strip, U.S. Route 91, where the neon and the par lamps—bubbling, spiraling, rocketing, and exploding in sunbursts ten stories high out in the middle of the desert—celebrate one-story casinos.80 […] Las Vegas has succeeded in wiring an entire city with this electronic stimulation, day and night, out in the middle of the desert."81

By creating a new style of architecture and urbanity, Las Vegas, in the early 1960s, had arrived for the first time at the frontier of the future. After researching the popular 'sin city' in 1968, the authors of the seminal architectural study *Learning*

76 Parallel to the development of neon modernism in Las Vegas, neon art emerged "as a significant phase in the development of what was to be electronic art." (Popper, Frank: *Art of the Electronic Age*, New York: Harry N. Abrams 1993, p. 17.)

77 VIVA LAS VEGAS VEGAS (USA 1964, D: George Sidney) was among the top grossing movies of the year, and the biggest success of all Elvis' films. (https://en.wikipedia.o rg/wiki/Viva\_Las\_Vegas). The single *Viva Las Vegas* sold 500.000 copies in the US alone (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Viva\_Las\_Vegas\_(song)#cite\_note-2).

78 Wolfe, Tom: "Las Vegas (What?) Las Vegas (Can't hear you! Too noisy) Las Vegas!!!!," in: *The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby*, New York: Noonday Press, 1966, pp. 3-28.

79 Ibid., p. 5.

*from Las Vegas* described the constant bombardment with sensory stimuli to which the city exposed its residents and visitors as an "intricate maze" that "disorients the occupant in space and time" by making both appear virtually "limitless."82 In Las Vegas's unique gestalt, they recognized an anti-modern semiotic system overlaying the structures of geography, "an architecture of communication over space,"83 an "'architecture as communication for the Information Age (rather than as space for the Industrial Age).'"84

Styles in which epochal tendencies express themselves usually emerge as correspondence among economic forces, technical possibilities, and cultural interests. The local and regional trade structures shaped the order of medieval towns built around the market. Later, the metropolises of the 19th century resonated with the national and international industrial economy. Siegfried Giedion judged the skyscrapers that rose to the heavens on the US East Coast in the first half of the 20th century to be "as significant and expressive for our period as the monolithic obelisk of Egypt and the Gothic cathedral tower were for their periods."85 Similarly, in the second half of the century, the sprawling suburban landscapes of the American West, obscured by advertising signs targeted at drivers, expressed in their carcentered architecture and sub-urbanity the emerging lifestyle(s) of a consumer civilization shaped by mass mobility and mass-brands.

In retrospect, the rapidly growing popularity of Las Vegas as a national and global entertainment destination in the quarter-century after World War II evidenced societal and cultural change. New technology has always led to a re-organization of established forms of work. With digitalization, labor lost its dependence on fixed hierarchical and temporal processes. Furthermore, the share of immaterial production in value creation grew. Its basis was knowledge work, i.e., the networked manipulation of software symbols. Iteration and distributed virtual collaboration replaced linear succession. But to be successful, knowledge work must be probing, investigational, and experimental.86 As a consequence, playful behavior gained value. Postindustrialization and digital technology, thus, initiated a

82 R. Venturi/D. Scott Brown/S. Izenour: *Learning from Las Vegas*, p. 49.

83 Ibid., pp. 8 ff.

84 Cited after Manovich, Lev: "The Poetics of Augmented Space," *Visual Communication* 5, no. 2 (2006): pp. 219-240, here p. 232.

85 Giedion, Siegfried: *Space, Time and Architecture: The Growth of a New Tradition*, Cambridge: Harvard University Press 1949, p. 635.

86 See Chaplin, Heather: "Will The 21st Century Be Defined By Games?" *Kotaku*, September 12, 2013, http://www.kotaku.com.au/2013/09/will-the-21st-century-be-de fined-by-games/

ludic turn. The rise of both the theme park genre and Las Vegas as the world capital first of gambling and then, in the 1990s, family entertainment owes much to this social shift.

In the history of architecture, the fascination with Las Vegas's neon modernism demonstrated a rising social need for more accessible and meaningful cityscapes. The neon signs flaring up on the concrete facades represented an epochal return of the ornament displaced by modernism and thus its postmodern deconstruction. The "era of capitalist industrialization [had] undercut the symbolic basis of the built environment," Mark Gottdiener wrote in his assessment of industrial urbanity: "Domination of design and planning by modernist principles eradicated developed thematic elements in cities through new construction that avoided symbols […]."87 Consequently, "[…] capitalist downtowns were relatively devoid of meaning and were functionally structured by the needs of business."88 Behind modern architecture, of course, were not only economic but also aesthetic intentions. Lev Manovich sums them up:

"[M]odernist architecture […] communicated its […] narratives (the themes of progress, technology, efficiency, and rationality) through its new spaces constructed from simple geometric forms—and also through its bare, industrial looking surfaces. (Thus the absence of information from the surface, articulated in the famous 'ornament is crime' slogan by Adolf Loos, itself became a powerful communication technique of modern architecture)."89

The result, however, was poverty of information, meaning, and sense. Around the middle of the 20th century—compared to the present day—the opportunities to obtain information in urban environments were minimal. Analog street signs, house numbers, bell boards, directional signs, display boards, advertisement posters, etc., were static, therefore often outdated. And even if they were up-to-date, their generality did not necessarily convey the information needed individually at the moment. Additional information, however, could only be gathered in a timeconsuming manner through printed listings and guides or verbal inquiries with shopkeepers, receptionists, cab drivers, passers-by, etc. In contrast, the profusion of signs conveying information and meaning in theme park sceneries and the casino hotels' neon modernism can be understood as an attempt to remedy the symbolic and informational paucity of modern architecture and industrial urbanism as was possible with analog means and media. From today's perspective, Las

87 M. Gottdiener: *The Theming of America*, p. 15.

88 Ibid., p. 27.

89 L. Manovich: "The Poetics of Augmented Space," p. 233.

Vegas's neon ornaments anticipated the informational and playful augmentation that digital connectivity was to bring.

The idea of supplementing the perception of reality through sign systems was first advanced by *Wizard-of-Oz*-writer Lyman Frank Baum in his 1901 novel *The Master Key: An Electrical Fairy Tale.* 90 Baum imagined futuristic glasses called "character markers." They projected letters on the forehead of every person encountered: "e" for "evil," "w" for "wise," etc. Actual experiments with such augmentation through personalized real-time information started already in the 1950s. Several military projects laid the foundations for the Global Positioning System (GPS), which was then developed since the mid-1970s.91

In the 1980s, the concept of mobile—portable and wearable—digital technology was advanced in science as well as in the arts. Telematic installations and immersive environments sought to integrate data and real space and build perceptual bridges between the real and virtual worlds.92 In 1990, Mazda introduced the first GPS system for consumers that could triangulate a car's position by communicating with satellites in space and augment real-world navigation with individualized directions.93 The same year, Boeing engineer Thomas P. Caudell coined the term "augmented reality" for such enhancements to human perception, decisions, and actions with networked information in real-time.94 In the last decade of the century, large-scale scientific projects explored how interactive virtual

90 Baum, L. Frank and Fanny Y. Cory: *The Master Key: An Electrical Fairy Tale, Founded Upon the Mysteries of Electricity and the Optimism of Its Devotees*, Indianapolis: Bowen-Merrill Co. 1901.

91 See Parkinson, Bradford W., Stephen T. Powers, and others: "The Origins of GPS, and the Pioneers Who Launched the System. Part 1," *GPS World*, May 1 2010, https://www.gpsworld.com/origins-gps-part-1/

92 See Freyermuth, Gundolf S.: "Computer machen Leute," *c't–magazin für computertechnik*, February 16, 1998, pp. 90-97; Negroponte, Nicholas (with Neil Gershenfield): "Wearable Computing," *Wired*, Dezember, 1995.

93 Steinquist, Paul: "The Future of Car Navigation Has Arrived," *The New York Times*, February 25, 2021, https://www.nytimes.com/2021/02/25/business/GPS-car-system s.html

94 Caudell, Thomas and David Mizell: "Augmented Reality: An Application of Heads-Up Display Technology to Manual Manufacturing Processes," *Proceedings of the Twenty-Fifth Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences* 2 (1992), pp. 659-669, https://www.researchgate.net/publication/3510119\_Augmented\_reality \_An\_application\_of\_heads-up\_display\_technology\_to\_manual\_manufacturing\_proc esses

sign systems could replace the existing analog ones.95 The first hybrid synthetic vision system was presented by NASA in 1999.96 In 2000, Bruce Thomas developed ARQuak, the first mobile augmented reality game, opening up urban space to playful interaction. 97

In Las Vegas, this tendency to anticipate the emerging augmentation of the urban space reached its peak in 1995 with the opening of the *Fremont Street Experience*. It was designed by Californian architect Jon Jerde, a pioneer of entertainment architecture. As one critic wrote, Jerde wanted to tear down "the walls between celluloid and reality."98 He sought to bring about the virtual superimposition of material reality with mediated information and narratives. At the cost of \$70 million, he spanned Fremont Street, the historic center of gambling around the *Golden Nugget* casino hotel, with a massive canopy, half a kilometer long, 27 meters high, and lit by two million lights. Like the transistors of an LCD monitor, they served, together with the 540,000-watt sound system, to present digital audiovisions. The decisive factor for the success of the *Fremont Street Experience* was less the architecture itself than the program for which the canopy provided the projection surface. The evening shows, controlled by 121 computers, transformed the urban space into a gigantic display of virtual entertainment. Mark C. Taylor drew the connection between cityscape and data space:

"Long associated with the seedy side of old Vegas, 'Glitter Gulch' recently has been transformed into what is, in effect, a gigantic computer terminal or virtual-reality machine. Vegas city planners have converted the train terminal, that was inspired by the glass architecture of the Parisian arcades, into a computer terminal to create the new space

95 For example, the Endeavour Expedition (University of Berkeley, http://endeavour.c s.berkeley.edu) or the Oxygen-Project of the MIT Media Lab (http://oxygen.lcs.m it.edu)

96 N.N.: "Synthetic Vision Would Give Pilots Clear Skies All the Time," *NASA*, April 22 2008, https://www.nasa.gov/centers/langley/news/factsheets/SynthVision.html

97 Piekarski, Wayne and Bruce Thomas: "ARQuake: The Outdoor Augmented Reality Gaming System," *Communications of the ACM* 45, no. 1 (January 1, 2002), pp. 36-38, https://www.academia.edu/2218400/ARQuake\_the\_outdoor\_augmented\_reality\_ga ming\_system

98 Iritani, Evelyn: "A Mall Master Takes On the World: Architect Jon Jerde Believes Cities Can Be Saved Through an Infusion of Fantasy and Fun That Blurs Cultural Boundaries. Not Everyone Likes the Idea," *Los Angeles Times*, July 5, 1996.

of the virtual arcade. […] To roam through Glitter Gulch is to discover the timely timelessness of terminal space."99

The fusion of architecture and urban planning with the info design of communication media anticipated a shift in the civilizational space-time structure. Las Vegas engaged in adapting urban space to digitalization. In his classic study *City of Bits*, which appeared the same year the Fremont Street Experience opened, William J. Mitchell described a similar transformation: "The worldwide computer network—the electronic agora—subverts, displaces and radically redefines our notions of gathering place, community, and urban life."100 Subsequently, at the turn of the 21st century, Joel Kotkin observed the emergence of a new "digital geography":

"[T]he rise of the digital economy is repealing the economic and social geography of contemporary America. The digital revolution not only accelerates the speed with which information is processed and disseminated, it also restates the relation of space and time within our communities."101

The telos of change seemed to be the replacement of the industrial city by the information-rich real-time city, in which location- and time-dependent information can be called up by the individual as needed—an augmented urban experience that only became recognized as an imminent future with mobile broadband networking after the turn of the millennium.102

99 Taylor, Mark C.: *Hiding*, Chicago: University of Chicago Press 1997, p. 262.

100 Mitchell, William John: *City of Bits: Space, Place, and the Infobahn*, Cambridge Mass.: MIT Press 1995, p. 5.

101 Kotkin, Joel: *The New Geography: How The Digital Revolution Is Reshaping the American Landscape*, New York: Random House 2000, p. 3.—Kotkin, however, countered Mitchell's assertion that virtualization would render the question of location irrelevant: "In truth, the importance of geography is not dwindling to nothing in the digital era; in fact, quite the opposite. In reality, place—geography—matters now more than ever before. If people, companies, or industries can truly live anywhere, or at least choose from a multiplicity of places, the question of where to locate becomes increasingly contingent on the peculiar attributes of any given location." (Ibid., p. 6).

102 On the utopia and emergence of the real-time city, cf. e.g. Freyermuth, Gundolf S.: *Kommunikette 2.0*, Hannover: Heise 2002, pp. 125 ff. and Rheingold, Howard: *Smart Mobs: The Next Social Revolution*, Cambridge, Mass.: Perseus Pub. 2002.

*Freemont Street in Downtown Las Vegas; Top: the Neon 1950s; Middle: First Iteration of Freemont Street Experience Mid-1990s; Bottom: 2020s*

Source: Contemporary Promotional Postcards

In sum, Las Vegas's neon modernism shared with the following periods that it was an epochal style. It allowed for observing the decline and deconstruction of classical modernism as well as the superimposition of the material reality with informational virtuality ahead of time. Of course, apart from the on-and-off and upand-down flickering of the neon lettering and garlands that suggested movement, the information and narratives presented were as static as pre-modern ornamental forms of architecture. Only "today's electronic dynamic interactive displays make it possible for these messages to change continuously," creating "a potential space of contestation and dialog, which functions as the material manifestation of the often invisible public sphere," as Lev Manovich writes. 103

Even though Las Vegas transformed itself into a future place with neon modernism anticipating digital enhancement of urban experiences, this phase was almost completely erased from the Las Vegas Strip since the late 1980s. One after the other, the classic casino hotels were imploded as their neon adorned facades and signature parking lots had to make place for something radically new. 104

### **IV ANTICIPATING THE ULTIMATE DISPLAY: 1960S**

The origin of the subsequent two phases—the creation of immersive interior spaces and then immersive exterior spaces anticipating postmodern and digital architecture, as well as the virtualization of space in games and VR—dates back to the early 1960s. Under the influence of Hollywood, especially the epic historical drama CLEOPATRA, 105 real-estate developer Jay Sarno designed an entirely novel kind of casino hotel. When, after almost four years of construction, it opened in 1966, *Caesar's Palace* was the first casino to shift the usual gambling interactions into an immersive fictional space. In his history of special effects, Norman M. Klein describes the flashy interior decor featuring "'Rome swings,' and a Circus Maximus' showroom' [that] lined the 'exact' copies of Venus de Milo, Canova's Venus, many Venuses. Poolside was an 'Olympic'-sized replica of the baths of

103 L. Manovich, "The Poetics of Augmented Space," p. 232.

104 For example, *The Dunes* was demolished in 1993 and replaced with *The Bellagio*; *The Sands* was demolished in 1996 and replaced with *The Venetian*. See for descriptions and videos Kachelriess, Rob: "The 10 Best Implosions in Las Vegas History," *Thrillist*, February 25, 2014, https://www.thrillist.com/entertainment/las-vegas/the-10-best-implosions-in-las-vegas-history

105 CLEOPATRA (USA 1963, D: Joseph L. Mankiewicz)

Pompeii, where showgirls dressed like Cleopatra greeted guests […]."106 The casino, writes Laura Bieger, "promised its visitors an imaginary journey to the 'imperial Rome.'"107

*Caesar's Palace Developer Jay Sarno Riding a Flower Chariot with Entertainer Line Renaud on Opening Day August 6, 1966*

Source: Contemporary Promotional Photograph

Besides the direct influence of Hollywood cinema, a second inspiration was apparent: the aesthetics of fairs, circuses, amusement parks like *Coney Island* in New York, the Viennese *Prater*, the *Tivoli* in Copenhagen, and, of course, Disneyland. When Jay Sarno planned *Caesar's Palace*, he took the new kind of themed transmedial environments that Disney had created a few years earlier as a model. But for his special needs, Sarno had to adapt the exterior attractions and thrill rides of the gated theme park to the interior environments of his semi-public casino hotel. This appropriation can be understood as an internalization of theme park

106 Klein, Norman M.: *The Vatican to Vegas: A History of Special Effects*, New York: New Press 2004, p. 4. See also L. Bieger: *Ästhetik der Immersion*, p. 161.

107 L. Bieger: *Ästhetik der Immersion*, p. 124 (Footnote 64), my translation.

aesthetics. Most importantly, with the transfer from outside to inside, Sarno retained Disney's artistic intentions of heightened immersion. While Disneyland replaced cinema screens with built spaces and movie audiences that watched immobilized in their seats with walking theme park guests, *Caesar's Palace* replaced the standard Las Vegas attraction of neon signs, which could only be seen as long as one had not yet entered the casino, with themed interior environments that completely immersed visitors, i.e., gamblers, in a fictional recreation of antiquity.

*Circus Circus, Early 1970s*

Source: Contemporary Promotional Postcard

Two years after *Caesar's Palace*, Sarno opened a second casino hotel with sumptuous stage settings, the *Circus Circus*. In adapting circensic aesthetics to the casino's interior world, Sarno went two steps further than with *Caesar's Palace*. First, he integrated gambling and movement play—in the terminology coined by Roger Caillois in the late 1950s: alea and ilinx.108 In his semi-factual account *Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas*, self-declared Gonzo journalist Hunter S. Thompson portrayed, with some disgust, *Circus Circus's* surreal blend of the thrill of gambling with sensations of vertigo:

108 Caillois, Roger: *Man, Play and Games*, Urbana: University of Illinois Press 2001 (\*1958), pp. 12 ff.

"[…] so you're down on the main floor playing blackjack, and the stakes are getting high when suddenly you chance to look up, and there, right smack above your head is a halfnaked 14-year-old girl being chased through the air by a snarling wolverine, which is suddenly locked in a death battle with two silver-painted Polacks who come swinging down from opposite balconies and meet in mid-air on the wolverine's neck." 109

*Circus Circus, Early 1970s*

Source: Contempory Promotional Photographs

Thompson's description also reveals the second innovative moment of the casino. *Circus Circus* facilitated an immersion in ludic sensations completely beyond the distanced window view as it had been originally established in modern painting and then continued by the theater. Their worlds and events could be viewed but not entered.

"In the industrial age, cinema continued the tradition of the window view. The framed screen, originally also covered by a curtain, processed aesthetically, as Anne Friedberg argued, the industrial experience of the mobilized gaze through—mostly closed—glass

109 Thompson, Hunter S.: *Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas: A Savage Journey to the Heart of the American Dream*, New York N.Y.: Warner Books 1982 (\*1971), p. 46.

windows of different means of transportation moving faster and faster through the natural as well as the urban landscape. Later, in the second half of the 20th century, this everyday experience of transparent distance from moving images found its mediated correspondent in the framed glass screens of TVs (and then computers)."110

In their employment of perspectival tricks of theatrical and cinematic stage settings and the consistent presentation of tableaux, Disneyland and *Caesar's Palace* still played on the cultural habit of window gazing. As Thompson's description makes clear, *Circus Circus* finally transcended the framed gaze of analog audiovisual media. The casino placed the gambling visitors in a room—or more correctly: tent—with the acrobats, positioning them in the arena.

How pioneering this experiment in enhancing audiovisual immersion was can be deduced from the fact that, at the same time, two other completely different areas of research pursued a very similar goal. One is the emerging discipline of computer graphics. Yvan Sutherland founded the field with his 1962 MIT dissertation *Sketchpad, A Man-Machine Graphical Communication System*, for which he programmed the first interactive graphics program.111 Three years later, when Disneyland celebrated its tenth anniversary, and *Caesar's Palace* was nearing completion, Sutherland, then a professor at Harvard, presented a radical theoretical concept—the "ultimate display":

"The ultimate display would, of course, be a room within which the computer can control the existence of matter. A chair displayed in such a room would be good enough to sit in. […] With appropriate programming such a display could literally be the Wonderland into which Alice walked."112

Thus, an ultimate display for computer graphics should move the experience of visual content away from the window view—the view on the simulation of a framed window—and into the perspectival picture behind it. It would not show

110 G. Freyermuth: "From Analog to Digital Image Space: Towards a Historical Theory of Immersion," p. 181. See also Friedberg, Anne: *Window Shopping: Cinema and the Postmodern*, Berkeley: University of California Press 1993.

111 Sutherland, Ivan Edward: *Sketchpad: A Man-Machine Graphical Communication System*, New York: Garland Pub. 1980 (\*1963), https://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/techre ports/UCAM-CL-TR-574.pdf. The thesis advisor was Claude E. Shannon.

112 Sutherland, Ivan Edward: "The Ultimate Display," in: *Multimedia: From Wagner to Virtual Reality*, ed. Randall Packer and Ken Jordan, New York: Norton 2001 (\*1965), pp. 232-236.

2D copies of reality or images created in 2D but imagery that would be real in the sense that the user would be immersed and could experience the (audio-)visual worlds interactively.

In the following years, Sutherland tried in various ways to devise and construct elements of such an "ultimate display." In 1968, the year *Circus Circus* opened, he demonstrated the first head-mounted display (HMD), a cumbersome contraption nicknamed "The Sword of Damocles," the great grandfather of today's VR goggles.113 What could not yet be realized as a room thus became a space for privatized perception. Simultaneously, Sutherland and his team programmed a scene generator, the great grandfather of game engines, that allowed the interactive manipulation of computer graphics, such as flight simulations.114 With these three innovations: the concept of the Ultimate Display as not a window but a room, the HMD as a technical substitute for such a room, its simulation, and the Scene Generator as the software program to create immersive interactive visuals, Sutherland, in the second half of the 1960s, laid the foundations for virtual realities.

The second area of research that moved beyond the window view in the 1960s and placed the previous viewer in a room with the images was holography. In the late 1940s, Dennis Gabor, a physicist who had fled Nazi Germany for Britain, had proposed how a complete three-dimensional image could be recorded in form and projected into real space—by recording not just intensity (amplitude) and color (frequency) as photography did but also the phase of light. In 1971, he was to receive the Nobel Prize for his research. But at first, the technical means did not exist to reliably realize Gabor's experimental concept.

In contrast to the relatively slow development of hologrammatic research was its rapid progress in science fiction. Since Isaac Asimov's groundbreaking *Foundation* trilogy (1951-1953), novels, feature films, television series, and digital games have imagined holographic characters and worlds.115 David J. Pizzanelli

113 Sutherland, Ivan Edward: "A Head-Mounted Three Dimensional Display," *AFIPS '68 (Fall, part I): Proceedings of the December 9-11, 1968, fall joint computer conference, part I*, December, 1968, pp. 757-764, https://www.cise.ufl.edu/research/lok/ teaching/ve-s07/papers/sutherland-headmount.pdf

114 Rolfe, J. M. and K. J. Staples: *Flight Simulation*, Cambridge [Cambridgeshire]; New York: Cambridge University Press 1986, p. 234.

115 Asimov, Isaac: *Foundation*, New York: Gnome Press 1951; Asimov, Isaac: *Foundation and Empire*, New York: Gnome Press 1952; Asimov, Isaac: *Second Foundation*, New York: Gnome Press 1953.

has analyzed this myth of holography as an expression of mass psychological needs for immersive imagery. 116

In practice, hologrammatic recordings became possible only after the development of laser light in the 1960s, based on calculations made by Albert Einstein as early as 1917.117 Holography thus established itself as a scientific field of research. In parallel, a multitude of artistic experiments occurred worldwide. Particularly in the psychedelically oriented counterculture of the American West, the seemingly weightless light sculptures fascinated the hippie public. At the same time, the transition from static to moving holographs was accomplished. In 1969, American physicists produced a 30-second holographic film showing tropical fish in an aquarium.118 Exhibitions of holographic works that experimented with light and movement in ways never before seen attracted hundreds of thousands of visitors.119 The first "School of Holography" opened in San Francisco in 1971, and the first "Museum of Holography" in New York in 1976.120 Among the most successful pioneers of holographic art were the Americans Stephen Benton, Robert Whitman, James Turrell, Rockne Krebs, the Dutchman Rudie Berkhout, and the German Dieter Jung.121 Even commercial mass medial use, for example, holographic television, no longer seemed out of the question at the time.122 In this context, the position of analog holography in media history can be identified: as a techno-aesthetic break with the tradition of simulating three-dimensionality in perspective.123

116 Cf. Pizzanelli, Daniel J.: "The Evolution of the Mythical Hologram," *Proceedings of the SPIE. The International Society for Optical Engineering* (1992), pp. 430-437.

117 K. Popper: *Art of the Electronic Age*, p. 29.

118 Kac, Eduardo: "Beyond the Spatial Paradigm: Time and Cinematic Form in Holographic Art," Sixth International Symposium on Display Holography 3358 (1998), https://www.spiedigitallibrary.org/conference-proceedings-of-spie/3358/0000/Beyondthe-spatial-paradigm--time-and-cinematic-form-in/10.1117/12.301482.short?SSO=1

119 Johnston, Sean F.: "Whatever Became of Holography?" *American Scientist*, November/December, 2011, https://www.americanscientist.org/article/whatever-became-ofholography

120 Ibid.

121 K. Popper: *Art of the Electronic Age*, p. 29.

122 S. Johnston: "Whatever Became of Holography?"

123 Desbiens, Jacques: "The Dispositif of Holography," *Arts* 8, no. 1 (2019), p. 28, https:// www.mdpi.com/2076-0752/8/1/28. "[T]he holographic dispositif breaks with the perspective tradition and opens a new field of artistic research and experimentation."

The parallels to aesthetic experiments in Disneyland and Las Vegas are apparent: the movement from passive viewing to active entry into fictional spaces. In popular entertainment, this was undertaken by creating themed environments in the material world; in computer graphics, by designing themed environments in the realm of software; in holography, by recording not only amplitude and frequency—the different brightness and color—as in regular photography but also the phase of the object wave, i.e., the shape of the object. However, the drastic difference was in the (audio-)visual quality of the created experiences. The low resolution and 'unrealism' of the fledgling interactive computer graphics as well as of holography in the 1960s and 1970s, reminiscent of rough sketches or ghost images, contrasted considerably with the—so to speak 'high-resolution'—realism of the built fantasy worlds of Disneyland, *Caesar's Palace,* and *Circus Circus*.

Comparing these corresponding efforts to overcome the distanced window view in favor of a participatory entry into artificial worlds, it seems that theme parks and the Las Vegas entertainment architecture tried to produce experiences in the material world for which there was a specific demand that the emerging new analog and digital media could not satisfy yet. From this perspective, the themed attractions of the 1960s in the American West appear as anticipations; on the one hand of the contemporary holy grail of computer graphics: the "ultimate display" as a means for interactive spatial immersion; on the other hand of a holographic projection of images into real space, as it became possible only in our century with digital holography and its fusion with practices of augmented and virtual reality.

### **V ANTICIPATING VIRTUAL WORLDS: 1990S**

The aesthetic and economic risk Jay Sarno had taken with the partially themed casino hotels *Caesar's Palace* and *Circus Circus* found no successor in the corporate culture of the 1970s and early 1980s. Parallel to the decline of industrialism, Las Vegas entered a crisis that was both economic and aesthetic. Fremont Street, the old downtown gambling center, experienced inner-city decay like many major American cities. As time went by, even Las Vegas's ubiquitous neon magic started to wear thin. The mixture of lack of imagination and sleaziness that ensued deterred well-heeled gamblers. In the 1980s, aesthetic stagnation was followed by an economic recession.124 During the day, Vegas resembled a typical, sprawling

124 "By the late seventies, however, the number of visitors to Las Vegas had plateaued and even briefly declined." (Lehrer, Jonah: "Royal Flush: How Roger Thomas

American midtown. Empty strips of dusty desert lay between the aging concrete bunkers. At night, when the ten, twelve-story-high neon signs transformed the fortress-like fronts of the casino hotels, the entertainment possibilities beyond gambling were limited to half a dozen better restaurants and a selection of shows by stars whose best times lay behind them. Las Vegas was going out of fashion.

Toward the end of the decade, however, the fourth phase started: the biggest building boom in the city's history. Between 1989 and 1999, almost a dozen megaresorts were erected for over \$10 billion on the Strip alone.125 The driving force behind this new beginning was a change in the financing model: from dependence on gambling to its combination with family-oriented tourism.126 It all started with Steve Wynn's *The Mirage*. When it opened in 1989, it was the first new casino hotel built on the Strip in thirteen years and with construction costs of nearly \$630 million, the most expensive ever. Offering over 3,000 rooms, *The Mirage* was also the world's largest hotel and, most importantly, the first to replace neon signs with immersive fantasy environments. "Neon is cheap," Wynn declared: "It's yesterday's Las Vegas."127 Inside the tropical hotel, the rainforest grew, and waterfalls roared. The actual sensation, however, awaited visitors before they entered: Wynn did away with the parking lot and illuminated facades and opted instead for a 3D volcano, seventeen meters high. After dark, the volcano erupted at regular intervals, thundering and spewing fire high in the sky—deliberately obstructing the guests' view of the old neon strip.

*The Mirage* marked the beginning of a dozen such fantasy environments spilling from the casinos' interiors onto the boulevard.128 Just four years later, Wynn

126 N.N.: "Vegas Hopes to Lure Families," *Journal and Courier*, December 3, 1989, https://www.newspapers.com/newspage/264230932/

redesigned Vegas," *The New Yorker*, March 19, 2012, https://www.newyorker.com/ magazine/2012/03/26/royal-flush-2)

125 Among the most expensive new buildings were: *MGM Grand* (1993, ca. \$1.1 billion); *Luxor* (1993-1998; ca. \$1.2 billion); *New York New York* (1997, ca. \$460 million); *Bellagio* (1998, ca. \$1.6 billion); *Paris* (1999, ca. \$760 million); *The Venetian* (1999, ca. \$2.5 billion).

127 Ibid.

128 The name *Mirage* was an obvious choice when building a tropical oasis in a desert city. However, it is at the same time an interesting coincidence that 'mirage' also served as the first known explanation of the term virtual reality: "When the French polymath Antonin Artaud introduced the expression 'la réalité virtuelle' as a description of theater in his 1932 essay 'The Alchemical Theater,' he […] likens theater to

took this transition from two-dimensional neon aesthetics to three-dimensional entertainment environments a step further with *Treasure Island*. The casino hotel was themed as a pirate's nest and featured a street-side bay with two galleons that engaged in naval battles several times per day. Further down Las Vegas Boulevard, the *Excalibur* opened that same year, slated to be King Arthur's castle with candy-colored battlements and towers. Other fantasy resorts built during the decade were the Spanish 'Hemingway' village of *Sunset Station* hotel and the onebillion-dollar *Mandalay Bay*, the forbidden city of a lost South Sea culture. In its sandy bay, guests could surf in the desert for the first time thanks to a wave machine.129

Striking about these so-called 'megaresorts' that shot up in Las Vegas during the 1990s was not only that they introduced immersive 3D exteriors. Remarkable was also that many of these new spaces no longer promised immersion into fictional worlds—as the interiors of *Caesar's Palace* and *Circus Circus* had done since the 1960s, and the exteriors of *The Mirage*, *Treasure Island, Excalibur,* or *Mandalay Bay* since the early years of the construction boom. Starting in 1992 with another interior world, the Roman alleys and squares of *Caesar's Palace Forum Shops*, Las Vegas's entrepreneurs suddenly aspired to replicate existing monuments or cities. This new group of 'simulations of the real' included, in addition to the replicas already mentioned—Rome (1992/98) and Paris (1999)—the pyramid of *Luxor* (1993), the skyline of *New York, New York* (1997), the Italian Lake Como village at the foot of the *Bellagio* (1998), and—most expensive and most spectacular—*The Venetian* (1999), a life-size recreation of Venetian landmarks.

Two complementary forces seem to have been driving this turn to simulations of real places. The first explanatory model compares Las Vegas's replicas to the compressed and stylized mental images travelers tend to form of tourist destinations. Materializations of such personal memories and collective visions of the real—"architectural translations of locales"130—have been created for entertainment purposes since leisure traveling became a social desire and widespread practice. In the 19th and early 20th century, 'ersatz' and memory places ranged from

the 'fictitious and illusory" world of alchemy. Both of them are 'virtual arts,' and both involve a 'mirage' […]." (D. Chalmers: *Reality+*, loc. 3089.)

129 CF. for example Booth, Cathy: "In With The New," *Time*, November 2, 1998, http://content.time.com/time/world/article/0,8599,2053901,00.html

130 L. Bieger: *Ästhetik der Immersion*, p. 142, my translation.

*City Simulations on the Las Vegas Strip, 1990s: Top: New York New York Hotel and Casino; Bottom Left: Paris Hotel and Casino; Bottom Right: The Luxor Hotel and Casino*

Source: Promotional Photographes of the Hotel Casinos

panorama buildings whose paintings and diorama-like installations showed distant cities or landscapes to spectacular amusement park attractions. One of the most celebrated was the entertainment park "Venice in Vienna," which opened in 1895 on 50,000 square meters of the public *Prater* park and featured artistic reproductions of Venetian buildings and canals navigable by gondolas.131

A second approach positions Las Vegas's turn to simulations of the real at the frontier of digital culture. As mentioned above, Robert Venturi, William J. Mitchell, and numerous other theorists have explained the effect of digital technology and media on architecture and urbanity as a fundamental paradigm shift, not least in the perception of time, space, and the world, the increasing intertwining of material and virtual structures.132 What began around 1990 in Las Vegas—the simultaneous dislocation of real-world places and their structural compression could thus indicate the emergence of a new epochal style: the transition from industrial modernism and postmodernism to architecture and urban planning oriented towards digital culture and emerging lifestyles that have as their vanishing point a Metaverse-like fusion of reality and virtuality.

The elaborate simulation of cities and monuments, especially *The Venetian*, thus testify to an architectural adaptation comparable to the rise of panoramas and passages in early industrialization. The zones of Las Vegas, where simulations of real places were clustered and made their concentrated impact, were no longer part of a city in the modern sense but resembled virtual realities—aesthetically entirely and, to a lesser extent, functionally. These analog simulations of virtuality through real montages—the creation of post-realities whose aesthetic experience sought to replace the 'originals' that existed far away or only in fiction—foreshadowed the emerging transmedial realization of virtuality.133

131 N.N.: "Venedig in Wien," *Wien Geschichte Wiki*, June 6, 2017, https://www.ge schichtewiki.wien.gv.at/Venedig\_in\_Wien.—In addition to stores, restaurants, cafés, wine taverns and beer gardens, numerous stages offered concerts, operettas, revues, and wrestling tournaments.

132 Cf. Carpo, Mario: *The Alphabet and the Algorithm*, Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press 2011; Shepard, Mark: *Sentient City: Ubiquitous Computing, Architecture, and the Future of Urban Space*, New York City, Cambridge, Mass.: Architectural League of New York; MIT Press 2011.

133 Technically, the themed architecture was made possible not least by the development of new high-tech machinery and building materials. Cf. e.g.: "So much lightweight material, including plastic designed to simulate nonplastic, is now used in the construction of the physical world that, according to a study published in a recent issue of the journal Daedalus, the amount of mass required to build the physical reality

*The Venetian; Top Left: Promotional Postcard, 1990s; Top Middle: Exterior Canal with Gondolas; Top Right: Interior Canal with Gondola; Bottom Left; Replica of Doge Palace; Bottom Right; Replica of Campanile Tower.*

Sources: Promotional Postcards, Promotional Photography, and Gundolf S. Freyermuth

around us has on a per capita basis actually begun to decline." (Murphy, Cullen: "The Real Thing," *The Atlantic Monthly*, August 1997, https://www.theatlantic.com/maga zine/archive/1997/08/the-real-thing/376923/)

In digital graphics, related attempts were made to enable immersive experiences of artificially created environments without the costs, imponderables, and dangers of physical actions or journeys. Ivan Sutherland's 1960s experiments with headmounted displays for flight simulations had led to the "Visually Coupled Airborne Simulator," produced for the US Air Force. These HMDs cost about \$1 million apiece and seemed so futuristic that—in the times of the first STAR WARS sequels and the S*trategic Defense Imitative*, which was derisively nicknamed "Star Wars" as well—they were referred to as "Darth Vader helmets."134 By the mid-1980s, however, the leading military technology became considerably cheaper due to a NASA project using prefabricated parts. Its goal was to build simulation systems that could be navigated and manipulated interactively but independently of specific hardware.

At this point, Jaron Lanier came into play. The young artist earned his living designing video games, including the successful music game MOONDUST for the Commodore 64. 135 But he was also experimenting with what was then called virtual environments (VE). Lanier recognized that NASA's approach meant the progression from 'special simulations' such as flight or driving simulations with specific hardware—certain cockpits, and so forth—to 'universal simulations,' i.e., simulation apparatuses as universal as the digital computer is a universal machine. For this new software-based simulation environment, which promised to realize Sutherland's concept of the ultimate display partially, Jaron Lanier coined the term *Virtual Reality*. 136

In 1987, VPL Research—Lanier's company—built the first such universal simulation machine as a commercial product, the \$250 000 *EyePhone.* It consisted of a Macintosh computer, serving as the control system, and two Silicon Graphics workstations, each of which calculated the virtual worlds at 30 frames per second for one eye. The head-mounted display featured built-in stereo speakers and two LCD eye monitors producing stereoscopic 3D images. A data glove or a full-body DataSuit completed the hardware setup. *EyePhone's* centerpiece was the

134 Bye, Ken: "50 years of VR with Tom Furness: The Super Cockpit, Virtual Retinal Display, HIT Lab, & Virtual World Society," *Voices of VR Podcast*, November 17, 2015, https://voicesofvr.com/245-50-years-of-vr-with-tom-furness-the-super-cockpi t-virtual-retinal-display-hit-lab-virtual-world-society/

135 MOONDUST (Creative Software Inc. 1983, O: Jaron Lanier)

136 Steuer, Jonathan: "Defining Virtual Reality: Dimensions Determining Telepresence," *Journal of Communication*, no. 42, 4 (1992), pp. 73-93, here p. 73, https://steinhard tapps.es.its.nyu.edu/create/courses/2015/reading/steuer.pdf

proprietary software that could dynamically execute a multitude of simulations from flight to architecture to games—using the same set of hardware.137

More than thirty years later, the modernity of the system is stunning. The *EyePhone's* electromagnetic movement detection allowed for the first time two or more users to experience a virtual space simultaneously.138 The software adjusted the virtual 3D worlds according to the direction of their gazes and gestures. Interactions in VR seemed like magic. Consequently, Lanier thought VR was "the dawn of a new era, like when Columbus returned to Spain with news of the New World. Only this time, the New World is infinite; it's the virtual world, still largely uninvented and unexplored."139 Far-reaching hopes like these were widespread in the early 1990s when VR enjoyed its first boom phase though it was still expensive and somewhat primitive. In his classic reportage *Virtual Reality: The Revolutionary Technology of Computer-Generated Artificial Worlds—And How it Promises and Threatens to Transform Business and Society,* Howard Rheingold captured the spirit of optimism sparked by the new medium. 140

Under capitalist circumstances, however, all utopian approaches—concepts as well as technologies—intertwine with their commercial exploitation, as Frederic Jameson has pointed out, albeit from the opposite perspective:

"[…] the works of mass culture cannot be ideological without at one and the same time being implicitly or explicitly Utopian as well: they cannot manipulate unless they offer some genuine shred of content as a fantasy bribe to the public about being so manipulated."141

Rheingold saw the situation of the utopian medium of virtual reality no differently. During the boom phase of the construction of imaginary places and copies of existing 'exotic' locales on the Las Vegas Strip, the "marriage of VR and Vegas

137 Sorene, Paul: "Jaron Lanier's EyePhone: Head and Glove Virtual Reality in the 1980s," *flashbak*, November 24, 2014, https://flashbak.com/jaron-laniers-eyephonehead-and-glove-virtual-reality-in-the-1980s-26180/

138 Mandel, Margery: "Careers: Entrepreneur Laid Foundations In Another World," *Boston Herald*, June 16, 1996.

139 Scheinin, Richard: "Through the Looking Glass: 'Virtual Realities' Can Take Us Into Other Worlds," *Chicago Tribune*, February 18, 1990.

[seemed] inevitable": "By building 'destination resorts' with fantasy experiences at the center, the casinos are appropriating the high-end illusion business from the moviemakers and theme parks."142

## **VI ANTICIPATING VIRTUAL DESIGN: 1990S**