The Made World

About This Book

Put on a modern virtual-reality headset and something strange happens in the first few seconds: your body believes the lie. You flinch at a ledge that is not there, reach for a rail made of light, forget the room you are standing in. That trick — presence, the felt sense of being somewhere you are not — is the oldest new thing in technology. People have chased it since the Victorians pressed their faces to stereoscopes, since a filmmaker built a one-man cinema of wind and smell, since a young engineer hung the first headset from the ceiling on a boom and called his dream the Ultimate Display.

The Made World tells the whole of that story, from first principles and in plain language, for readers who have never given a thought to how any of it works. It explains, with everyday analogies, exactly how two small screens and a fistful of sensors fool the brain into stepping through the glass — and why the same illusion keeps arriving, dazzling us, disappointing us, and arriving again. It follows the people who built the machines and coined the words: Sutherland and Heilig in the lab; Jaron Lanier, who named virtual reality and watched the first boom collapse; Palmer Luckey, who rebuilt it in a garage; Mark Zuckerberg, who renamed his company after a science-fiction word and bet tens of billions on it. And it takes the metaverse — the dream of a shared world you can live inside — seriously enough to say plainly where it is real, where it is hype, and where it went spectacularly wrong.

Balanced, vivid, and honest about the sickness, the isolation, the surveillance, and the money, it is the one book for anyone who wants to understand how we learned to build worlds — and whether we should want to live in them.