1957-62: Morton Heilig, a cinematographer, creates and patents a motorbike simulator called Sensorama with visuals, sound, vibration, and smell. The Sensorama was a machine that is one of the earliest known examples of immersive, multi-sensory (now known as multimodal) technology. The Sensorama was able to display stereoscopic 3D images in a wide-angle view, provide body tilting, supply stereo sound, and also had tracks for wind and aromas to be triggered during the film.

1966: Ivan Sutherland invents the head-mounted display suggesting it was a window into a virtual world.

1975: Myron Krueger creates Videoplace that allows users to interact with virtual objects for the first time. His idea with the Videoplace was the creation of an artificial reality that surrounded the users, and responded to their movements and actions, without being encumbered by the use of goggles or gloves.

1989: Jaron Lanier coins the phrase Virtual Reality and creates the first commercial business around virtual worlds.

1992: Tom Caudell coins the phrase Augmented Reality while at Boeing helping workers assemble cables into aircraft.

1992: L.B. Rosenberg develops one of the first functioning AR systems, called VIRTUAL FIXTURES, at the U.S. Air Force Armstrong Labs, and demonstrates benefit on human performance.

 1992: Steven Feiner, Blair MacIntyre and Doree Seligmann present first major paper on an AR system prototype, KARMA, at the Graphics Interface conference. Widely cited version of the paper is published in Communications of the ACM next year.

1994: Milgrim defines a continuum of real to virtual reality environments. AR is placed as a mixed reality on the continuum spectrum.

1997: Azuma published a survey paper which defined the field of AR.

1999: Hirokazu Kato develops ARToolKit  at the HITLab and it is demonstrated at SIGGRAPH that year. ARToolKit is a computer vision tracking library that allows for the creation of augmented reality applications that overlay virtual imagery on the real world. To do this, it uses video tracking capabilities in order to calculate the real camera position and orientation relative to square physical markers in real time.

2000: Bruce H. Thomas develops ARQuake, the first outdoor mobile AR game, and is demonstrated in the International Symposium on Wearable Computers.

2002: Steven Feiner is the leading pioneer of augmented reality, and author of the first paper on the subject. Feiner, S. K. "Augmented Reality: A New Way of Seeing: Computer scientists are developing systems that can enhance and enrich a user's view of the world". Scientific American, April 2002.

2002: Bruce H. Thomas is the inventor of the first outdoor augmented reality game ARQuake. His current research interests include: wearable computers, user interfaces, augmented reality, virtual reality, computer supported cooperative work (CSCW), and tabletop display interfaces.

2005: Horizon Report: Profile Augmented Reality as New technology trend to watch. The Report predicts that AR technology will emerge more fully within 4-5 years.

2005: Camera system developed that can analyze physical environments in real time and relate positions between objects and environments. This work has become the basis for AR systems to integrate reality with virtual objects. 

2005: Daniel Palanker, Alexander Vankov and Phil Huie develop a "bionic eye".

2007: Facial feature tracking to allow for greater control of perspective. For example, a conductor could command a certain set of virtual instruments with the movement of his eyes. 

2007: Medical applications for users. Sending visual cues to help MS patients better keep their balance.

2008: A multiple new innovations and examples of AR now exist across a multitude of areas!

2008: Wikitude AR Travel Guide launches on Oct. 20, 2008 with the G1 Android phone.

2009: AR Toolkit is ported to Adobe Flash (FLARToolkit) by Saqoosha, bringing augmented reality to the web browser.

Appendix 3: Other Commercial Development Considerations

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