By the early 1960s, the golden age of novelties-gimmicks like 3-D movies and Smell-O-Vision-had failed to deliver on their promise of immersing audiences in total visual illusion.

Only Morton Heilig seemed to have an inkling of things to come. In 1962, the Hollywood-based cinematographer and part-time inventor, patented an arcade game called Sensorama.

What was Sensorama? It was a mechanized marvel that used motion, sound, smells, even artificial breezes, to convince users they were riding a motorcycle through the streets of Brooklyn or watching a belly dancer perform.

Today, Sensorama would probably be called a "virtual reality video game" but in those days, no such thing as a video game or virtual reality existed.

Heilig's objective was to offer "reality for a nickel"-a multi-sensory experience that included tactile-feedback handlebars, 3-D stereoscopic views, and wafting aromas such as jasmine and hibiscus.

But Sensorama's innovations were too far advanced to be appreciated by a bottom-line business world. The ingenious ride didn't make a dime. 

Howard Rheingold's best-selling book, Virtual Reality (1991) resurrected Heilig's fascinating tale for a new generation of gamers. A thirty-second encounter with the last Sensorama machine known to survive, Rheingold concluded, was "a bit like looking up the Wright Brothers and taking their original prototype out for a spin." 

Years later, in a classic bit of understatement, Heilig admitted that "Sensorama may have been too revolutionary for its time." Rheingold agrees.

"As I wrote in my book nearly ten years ago," Rheingold explains, "there are several hard problems (latency is one, cumbersome gear is another) to solve before VR can be available or useful to many people, and we are only now beginning to see the kind of affordable computation power emerge."

Rheingold's prediction: "It will still be years, perhaps as much as a decade, before VR can be technically feasible for a significant fraction of the population."

Maybe when it does Mort Heilig's Sensorama will be dusted off, re-jiggered and given the launch it deserved the first time around.