A long time ago, in 1993 to be precise, an Italian computer company named Infobyte became quite famous for developing one of the first Italian-made "VR environments".
It was actually a demo that was meant to run on an Onyx w/Reality Engine 2 and could be seen in stereoscopy with a pair of shutterglasses. In this demo, the user could walk around a recreation of Superior Basilica of Assisi, but the real gimmick of it was the ability to jump into various paintings which depicted various vistas of a city (I think this is where Nintendo got the inspiration for Super Mario 64). The POV would then be transferred to a virtual mediaeval city surrounded by a desert, where demons were flying around in the sky and you could walk around the various buildings that were seen in the paintings, as well as enter those buildings and use some portals to return to the Basilica.
So far, what I found of it is:
1) a thumbnail screenshot in Ian Mapleson's web site <IMG src="https://i.imgur.com/fSJOJk1.png">[img]<URL url="https://i.imgur.com/fSJOJk1.png">https://i.imgur.com/fSJOJk1.png[/img]</IMG>
2) <URL url="https://imgur.com/a/0dlkHnL">
More screenshots from an archived copy of <URL url="https://issuu.com/adpware/docs/mc140">
an Italian computer magazine
3) the mention, in that magazine, that SGI wanted a copy of the demo, to host it in their Demo Center in Mountain View
4) the mention of that demo, <URL url="http://archive.irix.cc/siliconsurf/reality_land.htm">
in this very site, as being displayed in SGI's Reality Land booth at SIGGRAPH '94
But is the actual demo available anywhere? I am a volunteer at a <URL url="http://www.museodelcomputer.org/">
computer museum in Italy, which owns an Onyx, and I would really like to save this piece of Italian computer history from oblivion and exhibit it.
