Paper on Virtual Reality

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Abstract

Virtual reality (VR) entails the use of advanced technologies, including computers and various multimedia peripherals, to produce a simulated (i.e., virtual) environment that users perceive as comparable to real world objects and events. With the aid of specially designed transducers and sensors, users interact with displayed images, moving and manipulating virtual objects, and performing other actions in a way that engenders a feeling of actual presence (immersion) in the simulated environment. This is accomplished by having the simulation adjust to movements of the user’s body, so that the sensory cues always correspond to what users would expect were they performing the action in the real world. For example, the software ensures that the visual scene is always appropriate to the particular direction in which the user happens to be looking. Visual feedback is often supplemented by auditory cues that appear to remain in particular locations independent of changes in head position and the presentation of appropriately timed haptic, proprioceptive and vestibular information.The unique features and flexibility of VR give it extraordinary potential for use in work-related applications. It permits users to experience and interact with a life-like model or environment, in safety and at convenient times, while providing a degree of control over the simulation that is usually not possible in the real-life situation. The work-related applications that appear to be most promising are those that employ virtual reality for visualization and representation, distance communication and education, hands-on training, and orientation and navigation.

Despite the fact that virtual reality has greatly changed the way in which people are able to interact with and manipulate information, the technology is, in fact, an outgrowth of earlier generations of computing, and some of its core...