Who popularized the term 'virtual reality'?

The Theater and its Double was a 1938 book by French playwright Antonin Artaud, the first-ever record of the word ‘virtual reality. A reality that was both illusionary and fictitious.

The 1950s saw inventor Morton Helig working on a projection booth with 3D images and sound, a moving seat and smells/sensations of the road to give an impression that the person on the seat was riding a motorcycle, trying to give the first taste of virtual reality. It never went into production.

Virtual reality was termed somatic cognition and also augmented reality over the years, but the term Virtual Reality or VR stuck, popularized in the 1980s by Jaron Lanier, a gifted music composer, author and Time Magazine’s 100-most-influential-People honoree.

He developed a virtual reality headpiece with a glove, a technology that used a virtual space called ‘cyberspace’ where virtual objects were manipulated.