Bizaarely enough, I have just found out that someone I know was the son of the person who designed the reinforced concrete dome - there was another of these domes in Bovingdon which is not far from where I live

The Dome trainer buildings invented by Henry Stevens is probably the first ever military simulator using film and light.
We have all the information on its development at our museum.
The air to air and bomb aimer simulators were developed from the same system.

I remembered a project from Matthew Lombard to collate VR&telepresence references in film and TV. Now found it: smcsites.com/telepresence/

Red Dwarf had an earlier episode Season 2 "Better Than Life"

This message bought to you by "The Immersive Enclosure: Virtual Reality in Japan", by Paul Roquet www.amazon.co.uk/Immersive-En...

I don't know if anyone is documenting the history of those systems particularly well. A lot is written about American simulators of the 1970s-1980s, but I am looking for UK or EU developments along the same lines.

I promised to stop pre-Oculus, so here is my demo from 2011/2012 of a completely portable VR system. I did try for a short while to push this as a technical venture, but in the short term, the PC was the right platform. An iPhone 3GS driving a 1998 Sony Glasstron AR/VR display.

And there was a VR industry in the 2000s serving certain industries. I showed a couple of examples from an article I wrote for the RAE's Ingenia magazine www.ingenia.org.uk/articles/how...

In the late 1990s, much of the VR industry moved to CAVE-like systems on SGI big iron

Then I showed some video from the early Division Provision system, which was the "high-end" VR option in the early 1990s. This from an early study with Mel Slater on virtual treadmills, virtual bodies and presence responses