I found an old article on the advent of virtual reality from a Parade magazine from 1993. While the picture accompanying the article shows a girl wearing the Virtuality headset and playing a game, about 90% of the article is on how VR will be used in medicine and science. It's almost as if the writer is embarrassed about consumer uses of the technology.
The article talks about how NASA has taken data from Mars into a virtual reality program, how VR is used by oncologists to understand irregularly shaped tumors and how physicians at a university were experimenting with HMDs to study sonograms.
A Reader's Digest article on VR from the same year was a little better, but it also talked a lot about how the technology is used in medicine in the military. Some of the uses of "virtual reality" actually seemed to be referring to studying computer-generated images on a flat screen rather than with an HMD.
Oculus is the premier manufacture of virtual reality headsets today, but I don't hear much about it being used in science or medicine. Was the reporting from the 90s mainly a lot of hype?
There's a view programs or experimental programs about that use VR headsets (occulus, vive etc) in someway to teach surgeons or to assist doctors / surgeons in the field of medicine i believe.
