Editing Virtual reality (section)

==Etymology==
"[[Virtual (philosophy)|Virtual]]" has had the meaning of "being something in essence or effect, though not actually or in fact" since the mid-1400s.<ref name="etymonline.com">{{Cite web|url=https://www.etymonline.com/search?q=virtual|title=virtual &#124; Search Online Etymology Dictionary|website=www.etymonline.com}}</ref> The term "virtual" has been used in the computer sense of "not [[Reality|physically existing]] but made to appear by [[software]]" since 1959.<ref name="etymonline.com" />

In 1938, French avant-garde playwright [[Antonin Artaud]] described the illusory nature of characters and objects in the theatre as [[:fr:Réalité virtuelle|"la réalité virtuelle"]] in a collection of essays, ''Le Théâtre et son double''. The English translation of this book, published in 1958 as ''[[The Theater and its Double]]'',<ref name="Artaud 1958">[[Antonin Artaud]], ''The Theatre and its Double'' Trans. Mary Caroline Richards. (New York: Grove Weidenfeld, 1958).</ref> is the earliest published use of the term "virtual reality". The term "[[artificial reality]]", coined by [[Myron W. Krueger|Myron Krueger]], has been in use since the 1970s. The term "virtual reality" was first used in a science fiction context in ''The Judas Mandala'', a 1982 novel by [[Damien Broderick]].

Widespread adoption of the term "virtual reality" in the popular media is attributed to [[Jaron Lanier]], who in the late 1980s designed some of the first business-grade virtual reality hardware under his firm [[VPL Research]], and the 1992 film ''[[The Lawnmower Man (film)|Lawnmower Man]]'', which features use of virtual reality systems.<ref>{{cite journal | title = Computer science: Visionary of virtual reality | first = Aldo | last= Faisal | journal = [[Nature (journal)|Nature]] | volume = 551 | pages = 298–299  | year = 2017 | issue = 7680 | doi = 10.1038/551298a | bibcode = 2017Natur.551..298F | doi-access = free }}</ref>