Humans have been fascinated by optical illusions for hundreds of years. Garden-shed inventors dupe their audience with trickery and deception. Inventions such as the peep box, praxinoscope and flip-book were groundbreaking stages in the process of developing static images into moving images. From the 1780s, panoramas set a milestone in the creation of illusionary worlds — the first mass media of their time. In today’s digital world, such visual wonders and optical illusions have lost none of their magic. virtual reality is not a modern invention.