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"I suspect that religion is a necessary evil in the childhood of our particular species. And that's one of the interesting things about contact with other intelligences: we could see what role, if any, religion plays in their development."
- Arthur C. Clarke

Sceneshifter  
  An automated display device that produced random pictorial presentations.  

The place was cool and dark. A few men and women were at the bar; the rest sat around tables. Some youths were playing throw in the back. A mechanical tune-maker wheezed and composed in the corner, a shabby, half-ruined machine only partially functioning. Behind the bar a primitive sceneshifter created and destroyed vague phantasmagoria: seascapes, mountain peaks, snowy valleys, great rolling hills, a nude woman that lingered and then dissolved into one vast breast. Dim, uncertain processions that no one noticed or looked at....
Technovelgy from Last of the Masters, by Philip K. Dick.
Published by Orbit Science Fiction in 1954
Additional resources -

Compare to the moving picture player from When the Sleeper Wakes by HG Wells, and the life chamber from The Chamber of Life, by G. Peyton Wertenbaker.

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Additional resources:
  More Ideas and Technology from Last of the Masters
  More Ideas and Technology by Philip K. Dick
  Tech news articles related to Last of the Masters
  Tech news articles related to works by Philip K. Dick

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