Morton Heilig. Sensorama.

A booth for one

Sensorama looks like a large cabinet, the kind of machine found in an arcade. The viewer sits on a seat that can move, leans into a viewing hood, and the outside world disappears. What remains is a stretch of film and everything that comes with it.

According to Media Art Net, the media art archive of ZKM and the Goethe-Institut, Morton Heilig completed the machine in 1962. He imagined that for 25 cents a person could sit in the booth and take a ten minute virtual motorcycle ride through the streets of New York.

On that ride the viewer does more than watch. They hear stereo sound, see images with depth, feel the seat shake with the road and wind on the face. Bottles of scent hidden in the machine open at set moments. Later accounts mention exhaust fumes and the smell of pizza shops along the street.

No auditorium, no one in the next seat, no stranger laughing or coughing. Sensorama is a cinema for exactly one body, and every sense of that body is called upon.

The cinema of the future

Heilig was a filmmaker. From the mid 1950s he wrote about what he called the cinema of the future: a cinema that would not stop at the eye and ear but would reach all the senses. He began developing Sensorama around 1957.

His idea was simple. When you actually ride a motorcycle through a city, you do not only see the road. You are hit by wind, jolted, and you smell the smoke of the bus ahead. If cinema wants to take a viewer somewhere, it has to bring those things along.

Media Art Net places Sensorama within expanded cinema, alongside works such as Stan VanDerBeek's Movie-Drome and the Pepsi Pavilion by Experiments in Art and Technology at Expo 70. Heilig pushed that line towards a theatre of total illusion. He later patented designs for a three dimensional theatre and a simulator.

Of all the senses built into the machine, smell was the hardest. Images can be put on film, sound on tape. Smell has to be made, stored, then released at the right moment. It does not sit on the reel; it sits in a bottle.

Too early for its time

Sensorama was not a commercial success. Media Art Net notes that Heilig could not find a way to bring the prototype to market. In a later interview he suggested the machine may simply have been too far ahead of its time.

In the same years cinema tried other ways to bring smell into theatres, such as Smell-O-Vision in 1960, which piped odours to individual seats. The two directions differ. One sends smell to a whole theatre. The other folds the world into a single booth. Twenty years later John Waters put smell into the viewer's palm with a scratch card; see Polyester in Odorama.

Today Sensorama is often named as one of the ancestors of virtual reality. Modern headsets take the eyes and ears very far. Most still leave the nose behind in the room. Heilig, more than sixty years ago, refused to leave it behind.

Perhaps that is why Sensorama is still worth remembering. It is not only an old machine. It is a reminder that we know where we are not only by looking. We know by the wind, by the shaking, and by a whiff of smoke on a street corner.