Ars Electronica has a permanent Cave facility, so not having been in one for quite a long time, I signed up to take another look. I donned the polarized goggles that flickered in rapid alternation, and stepped into the small crowded chamber. There, sure enough, the walls, ceiling, and floor obliged with that familiar, slightly unreal 3D depth. Once again there came the usual symptoms of motion-sickness, my eyes decidedly disconnected from my other senses.

The main disappointment, however, was as before with the low resolution of the display, which did nothing to reward the close viewing distance of the cramped room. As with so many digital displays, the video disintegrated into jaggy lines and rough textures the closer one approached it. So panning and zooming in there ended up giving me not only a scrambled sensory experience, but also an impoverished visual one.

I compare this with old-fashioned stereo photography, which I remember first encountering many years ago, in the 1980s. Visiting the Leroy Street apartment of my friend Jane Nisselson, I happened to pick up a small stereoscope — not an antique, but rather a contemporary mass-produced viewer, molded from black and gray plastic. Peering through it towards the sunlight in her window, I had to force my eyes into a slightly cross-eyed squint, an act that successfully popped the image into startling 3D. There floating just in front of me was a nondescript desk and lamp, an image that possessed an uncanny mental presence.

Jane had been given this stereoscope by Scott Fisher, whom she’d met at MIT’s Architecture Machine Group (Nicholas Negroponte’s pre-Media Lab research center). Scott was to become a well-known proponent of VR, and Jane put me in touch with him when I moved briefly to San Francisco in the early 90s. It was he who introduced me to Michael Girard and Susan Amkraut, whose VR artwork, Menagerie, he had just produced for the Pompidou Center. (They describe the piece elsewhere on this site.)

Though now Hollywood is again embracing 3D.

Virtual reality never lived up to its exciting promise, and certainly not up to the considerable hype it generated; experiences like the one I had in the Cave proved to be all too typical.

It was years later, in Atlanta, that I crossed my eyes again to peer at vintage stereo photographs. These came from Peter Bahouth’s vast collection, which I had the chance to explore briefly one evening after dinner at his house. First I examined 19th century shots of household interiors, in which I was astonished by the visual detail I could summon forth from the twinned images inserted into the stereoscope. No scene could be taken in at a glance, each too multifarious and detailed for that kind of cursory inspection. But with a little effort, a conscious shift of focus, I could bring the almost palpable presence of a long-vanished object right up in front of me — a vase on a table, a gilt-framed mirror, an embroidered cushion — suspended in space, suspended in time. Each photograph seemed almost infinite, as if I could never examine quite everything it held — I even found myself craning my neck slightly, as if I could see around objects to what lay just behind or beyond them.

Peter then brought out the most unexpected prize of his collection, the stereo photographs a traveling salesman had taken so obsessively at mid-20th-century. There is somethiing about a stereoscope that lends itself to pornography, for not only do the various allurements of the desired body practically shove themselves into your gaze, but also they do so in a space even more private than that of a peep-hole.

None of the salesman’s photographs were explicitly pornographic, though they very nearly were. The one that pinned itself in my memory was of a man and woman dancing, perhaps in a bar. The stereogram caught them just as the man, having lifted his partner, was spinning her around. Her skirt had flared out, and at the apex of the 3D triangle formed by the woman’s momentarily spreadeagled legs was the evident prize: her bright white panties.

For a moment, the stereoscope I held seemed identical to the salesman’s camera, and I had the grotesque sense of his sweaty excitement.