Worlds never seen before. The contribution of cinema to the history of immersive cognitive experiences

The immersive visual-perceptive experience was not born with digital technologies, but has distant roots in the history of the representation of real and imaginary worlds. From the first examples for demonstration and later for educational purposes, some environments and technologies are described whose applications are still used today to develop direct knowledge of both real and virtual illusory environments. The method proposed is that of comparing real and virtual experiences starting from some examples of the history of representation technologies, considering in particular the contribution of cinema. Each environment, characterized by more or less immersive exploration methods, aims to document the fact that, already in historical times, such experiences have stimulated more or less complex creative and interdisciplinary learning paths between art, literature, landscape, history and technology.