The historical overview in SR3 gives a pretty good basic summary of the timeline of and reasons for the development of cyberware, magic, and the Matrix. But unless I'm overlooking something obvious, there's very little equivalent historical information there about rigging. So I have to ask, when was rigging first developed? Was it an unexpected side benefit of the development of simsense, or was there major research pressure to develop rigger technology? Who developed the first VCR, and what was it used for? And so forth...

Part of it is the spawn of ASIST technology that created the Matrix.

So it's derivative, but I have no answers for anything else.

I'd suggest it as an outgrowth of the increasing connectivity between military drivers/pilots (specifically, attack craft pilots such as Tankers, jet jocks, apache pilots and gunners) and the increasing necessity of aircraft to be built with an integral fly-by-wire system.

Of course, if you wanna get metaplot heavy, I could suggest Nightwraith as a test rigging flight.

But even *I* think that's dumb.

Because someone asked "how can we make the Apache/pilot combination even better?"

Then some other geek said, "Well, wait...how about we combine this virtual simsense with the pilot's own sensations to radically improve performance and survivability?"

A lot of scientific and technological innovation has come from, "what happens when we do this?"

Subsequently followed by, "what the hell, let's give it a shot!"

The academic version of, "hey y'all, watch this!"

-Siege

another possibility is that it grew out of the UAV projects. rigging while actually inside the vehicle might be a relatively newer concept.

I hope SimSense comes out as well!