The Made World

Put on a modern virtual-reality headset and something strange happens in the first few seconds: your body believes the lie. You flinch at a ledge that is not there, reach for a rail made of light, forget the room you are standing in. That trick - presence, the felt sense of being somewhere you are not - is the oldest new thing in technology. People have chased it since the Victorians pressed their faces to stereoscopes, since a filmmaker built a one-man cinema of wind and smell, since a young…