In 1935, Stanley G. Weinbaum wrote a short story titled “Pygmalion’s Spectacles,” about the invention of magical VR-like goggles that produced a “movie that gives one sight and sound . . . you are in the story, you speak to the shadows, and the shadows reply, and instead of being on a screen, the story is all about you, and you are in it.”†4 Ray Bradbury’s 1950 short story “The Veldt” imagines a nuclear family in which the parents are supplanted by a virtual reality nursery that the children never want to leave.
