Technologically, the first VR device was Morton Heilig’s Sensorama – a ‘Revolutionary Motion Picture System that takes you into another world with 3-D, wide vision, motion, color, stereo-sound, aromas, wind, vibrations’. Heilig shot, produced and edited the films himself. Titles included Motorcycle, Belly Dancer and I’m a Coca Cola Bottle. The machine had a bucket seat, handles, vents and a hooded canopy. In the end, the machinery was too complex and expensive, and Heilig failed to find investors; the Sensorama remained a prototype.

There’s a chilling scene near the beginning of Ray Bradbury’s 1953 classic, Farenheit 451, where Guy Montag discovers that his wife has overdosed on sleeping pills. When the nonplussed emergency technicians arrive they pump Mildred’s stomach using enormous machines, give her a blood transfusion and then leave matter-of-factly: all in a day’s work in the twenty-fourth century.

Leaving the cinema this week after watching Her, the new Spike Jonze film, three strong urges came over me, one after the other. The first was to walk back in and watch the very next session of the film. I'd been so overwhelmed by the sophistication of what Jonze had made I felt compelled to immerse myself in that wonderful world again. Now, my strong positive reaction to the film could just be my resonance with the film’s plot – a lonely writer (Theodore Twombly – Joaquin Phoenix) develops a relationship with his newly purchased operating system (Samantha – Scarlett Johansson) finding new insight into himself along the way.