When the team virtual reality was coined by Jaron Lanier, there were many apparently competing varieties: artificial reality, cyberspace, sensorama, even television. The academic establishment eshewed popular descriptions, using terms like virtual environments, virtual interface, synthetic environments, scientific visualization, teleoperation, .... The new concept certainly had traction, but it was unclear that people were thinking about the same thing. My contributions and opinions follow.

The first two pieces are the Autodesk Research Lab's description of the new immersive toys. Directions of Growth is my attempt to summarize what was going on.

Definitional and taxonomic questions were discussed widely. The final two pieces represent my own conclusions about what folks were talking about by introducing the ideas of syntax and semantics.