Multimedia - From Wagner to Virtual Reality
Excellent resource website: http://www.w2vr.com/contents.html
"This Website is the interactive companion to the book of the same title, Multimedia: From Wagner to Virtual Reality. A unique collection of seminal essays, the print edition traces a fertile series of collaborations between the arts and the sciences, going back to the years just after World War II – and even further, to composer Richard Wagner, whose ideas about the immersive nature of music theater foreshadowed the experience of virtual reality.
Among the essential articles gathered here are the Futurists' 1916 manifesto on cinema, which declared that the new medium would unite all media and replace the book; Vannevar Bush's 1945 Atlantic Monthly essay that leads directly to the hyperlinks in today's multimedia; J.C.R. Licklider's groundbreaking idea in 1960 that people and computers could collaborate in creative work; Nam June Paik's 1984 essay proposing that satellite technology would encourage a global information art; Tim Berners-Lee's 1989 proposal for a document-sharing network, which became the basis of the World Wide Web; and William Gibson's discussion of how he came up with the word "cyberspace." With an insightful introduction to the volume and critical commentaries on each article, editors Randall Packer and Ken Jordan lead us through the groundbreaking developments of the multimedia story."
source: http://www.w2vr.com/Book.html