Free Essays on Virtual Reality

Introduction Close your eyes and imagine yourself being able to jump off the Empire State Building and fly over New York City on your own personal tour. You catch a glimpse of Madison Square Garden and a breathtaking view of Broadway. Jump back a few hundred years into the medieval times and joust with a knight. One last visualization- you are playing baseball in Busch Stadium on the same team as Mark McGuire. The crowd is wild. You soak up the glory as you realize they are cheering for you! Now stop fantasizing. These things will probably never happen to you in real life. However, there is a way that you can experience the feeling that something like this is happening. If you’re open to new ideas and you have a good imagination, virtual reality maybe a toy for you! What exactly is virtual reality? Well, virtual reality can be defined as any medium where one feels a sense of â€Å"immersion† and â€Å"presence† in the environment generated or descri bed. This means that if your imagination is wild enough, watching any television show or reading a book can be virtual reality. I will define virtual reality as a highly interactive, computer-generated environment. Graphics-based virtual reality allows one to break the 2-Dimensional constraints of today’s familiar equipment and has many practical applications. Four of these applications are medical, space exploration and training, physical, and entertainment. Body Medical researchers have been using virtual reality techniques to synthesize diagnostic images of a patient’s body to do predictive modeling of radiation treatment using images created by ultrasound, magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), and X-ray. A radiation therapist in a virtual world could view and expose a tumor at any angle and then model specific doses and configuration of radiation beams to aim at the tumor more effectively. Since radiation destroys human tissue easily, there is n... Free Essays on Virtual Reality Free Essays on Virtual Reality Virtual Reality - What it is and How it Works Imagine being able to point into the sky and fly. Or perhaps walk through space and connect molecules together. These are some of the dreams that have come with the invention of virtual reality. With the introduction of computers, numerous applications have been enhanced or created. The newest technology that is being tapped is that of artificial reality, or "virtual reality" (VR). When Morton Heilig first got a patent for his "Sensorama Simulator" in 1962, he had no idea that 30 years later people would still be trying to simulate reality and that they would be doing it so effectively. Jaron Lanier first coined the phrase "virtual reality" around 1989, and it has stuck ever since. Unfortunately, this catchy name has caused people to dream up incredible uses for this technology including using it as a sort of drug. This became evident when, among other people, Timothy Leary became interested in VR. This has also worried some of the researchers who are trying to create very real appli cations for medical, space, physical, chemical, and entertainment uses among other things. In order to create this alternate reality, however, you need to find ways to create the illusion of reality with a piece of machinery known as the computer. This is done with several computer-user interfaces used to simulate the senses. Among these, are stereoscopic glasses to make the simulated world look real, a 3D auditory display to give depth to sound, sensor lined gloves to simulate tactile feedback, and head-trackers to follow the orientation of the head. Since the technology is fairly young, these interfaces have not been perfected, making for a somewhat cartoonish simulated reality. Stereoscopic vision is probably the most important feature of VR because in real life, people rely mainly on vision to get places and do things. The eyes are approximately 6.5 centimeters apart, and allow you to have a full-colour, thr... Free Essays on Virtual Reality Virtual Reality is considered one of the most exciting technologies today, constantly evolving and improving. According to Eric Drexler, a world known pioneer in this field, VR is "A combination of computer and interface devices (goggles, gloves, etc.) that present a user with the illusion of being in a three dimensional world of computer generated objects." The term ^virtual reality,^ is not finite in its meaning, but generally includes desktop VR, immersion VR, where the goggles and gloves are used, and projection VR. The virtual reality technology is not yet perfect and still too expensive for the common man. The use of high-end VR is mainly restricted to larger companies, and to special areas such as medical surgery and pilot training. Home users are limited to desktop virtual reality programs, which lets them navigate in three-dimensional worlds, but seldom gives the feeling of actually being there. The entertainment industry has yet to embrace the technol! ogy in full scale, but in his book ^Virtual Reality^ Howard Rheingold states ^Used today in architecture, engineering and design, tomorrow in mass-market entertainment, surrogate travel, virtual surgery and cybersex, by the next century ^VR^ will have transformed our lives.^ Will VR cause people to lose their grip on the real world, or is it just a continuation of previous developments that took people to imaginary places? People seem to always have escaped to ^imaginary worlds^, to get a way from the stress of real life and to relax. We have all experienced Greek theatre, read novels and been to the cinema, and lived ourselves into fiction stories that we identify with. Our imagination creates a fiction world, which leads us away from real life for a moment of time. In our own utopia, we forget contemporary problems of reality. Even though the virtual reality technology creates a utopia for us to explore, it is in a lot of ways different from other developments we know so well... Free Essays on Virtual Reality TABLE OF CONTENTS INTRODUCTION 3 WHAT IS VIRTUAL REALITY? 4 HOW DOES VIRTUAL REALITY WORK? 5 v The Three Levels of VR : 5 THE HISTORY OF VIRTUAL REALITY 7 VIRTUAL REALITY IN THE PRESENT 8 VIRTUAL REALITY IN THE FUTURE 9 THE TECHNOLOGY BEHIND VIRTUAL REALITY 9 v Video Display Devices: 10 v Audio Output Devices: 10 v Tactile Response Devices: 11 v Interactive Input Devices: 11 v Computers and Software: 12 IMMERSIVE & NON IMMERSIVE VR 12 v The Cave: 13 v Head-Mounted Display (HMD): 13 v The Boom: 14 v Input Devices and other Sensual Technologies: 14 v Shared Virtual Environments: 15 v VRML: 15 DRAWBACKS OF VR 16 THE SOCIAL IMPLICATIONS OF VIRTUAL REALITY 17 v The New Rules of Behavior: 17 v Adverse Effects: 17 Applications of VR 18 v A List of Existing VR examples: 18 DETAILED APPLICATIONS OF VR: 19 v Architecture: 19 v Visualization: 21 v Entertainment: 21 v VR in Movies: 22 v Manufacturing: 25 v Augmented Reality: 25 v Education & Training: 26 v Medical: 27 SUMMARY 27 CONCLUSION 28 BIBLIOGRAPHY 28 INTRODUCTION Throughout the many stages of media Virtual Reality (VR) has helped us to extend our perception, imagination and manipulation. VR is just an extra step on the long road, bringing the imagination as close and realistic as reality itself. After the first experiments in the fifties with complex kinesthetic devices like multiple cameras, senso-motoric devices and even smell generators, more elegant head-mounted devices were developed in the early nineties. Both defense research and the computer games industry were the main stimulators of VR. VR is everything and it is hard to describe what VR is not: It encapsulates all previous media, even books, slides, pictures, audio, video and multimedia. The typical contribution of VR is its effect of ‘immersion’; the user feels as if (s)he is in a different world. Both the sensations and the actions of the user should resemble as much a... Free Essays on Virtual Reality Introduction Close your eyes and imagine yourself being able to jump off the Empire State Building and fly over New York City on your own personal tour. You catch a glimpse of Madison Square Garden and a breathtaking view of Broadway. Jump back a few hundred years into the medieval times and joust with a knight. One last visualization- you are playing baseball in Busch Stadium on the same team as Mark McGuire. The crowd is wild. You soak up the glory as you realize they are cheering for you! Now stop fantasizing. These things will probably never happen to you in real life. However, there is a way that you can experience the feeling that something like this is happening. If you’re open to new ideas and you have a good imagination, virtual reality maybe a toy for you! What exactly is virtual reality? Well, virtual reality can be defined as any medium where one feels a sense of â€Å"immersion† and â€Å"presence† in the environment generated or descri bed. This means that if your imagination is wild enough, watching any television show or reading a book can be virtual reality. I will define virtual reality as a highly interactive, computer-generated environment. Graphics-based virtual reality allows one to break the 2-Dimensional constraints of today’s familiar equipment and has many practical applications. Four of these applications are medical, space exploration and training, physical, and entertainment. Body Medical researchers have been using virtual reality techniques to synthesize diagnostic images of a patient’s body to do predictive modeling of radiation treatment using images created by ultrasound, magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), and X-ray. A radiation therapist in a virtual world could view and expose a tumor at any angle and then model specific doses and configuration of radiation beams to aim at the tumor more effectively. Since radiation destroys human tissue easily, there is n... Free Essays on Virtual Reality The VR Centre for the Built Environment, a winner of an Office of Science & Technology Foresight Challenge Award, was established in June 1997 at University College London and Imperial College London. This is an interdisciplinary initiative involving the Bartlett, Centre for Advanced Spatial Analysis, Centre for Transport Studies and the Departments of Computer Science, Geography and Geomatic Engineering at UCL and IC-Parc at Imperial College along with a consortium of 16 industrial partners. It aims to research, develop and disseminate ways of designing, producing and operating buildings and urban areas using virtual reality techniques. The VR Centre's role is to bring the full range of computer graphics, interaction and digital data to the virtual building that currently drives the design-development-operation cycle. Information, analysis and simulations are being synthesised to allow design teams and their clients to predict the performance of proposals at both the urban and building scale. Virtual models are being developed to capture information on performance during the operational life of the building so that this can be fed back into future projects. The Centre is focusing on three key generic technologies: Technologies to help clients and end users understand the consequences of decisions; Technologies to allow better visualisation and interaction with design proposals; Technologies to capture information about the operation of the built environment and to feed that information back into the design, construction and operation process.... Free Essays on Virtual Reality Virtual Reality Virtual reality (VR) is the use of a computer to create an artificial environment that appears and feels like a real environment and allows users to explore a space and manipulate the environment. In its simplest form, a VR application displays what appears to be a three- dimentional view of a place or object, such as landscape, building, molecules, or red blood cell, which users can explore. For example, architects can use VR software to show clients how a building will look after a construction or remodeling project. In more advanced forms, VR software requires that users wear specialized headgear, body suits, and gloves to enhance the experience of the artificial environment (Vance and Reed 34-58). The headgear displays the artificial environment in front of a users eyes. The body suit and the gloves sense motion and direction, allowing a user to move through, pick up, or hold items displayed in the virtual environment. Experts predict that eventually the body suits will provide tactile feedback so users can experience the touch and feel of the virtual world. Many games, such as flight simulators, use virtual reality. In these games special visors allow users to see the computer-generated environment. As the user walks around the game's electronic landscape, sensors in the surrounding game machine record movements and change the view of the landscape accordingly. Companies increasingly are using VR for more practical commercial applications, as well. Automobile dealers, for example, use virtual showrooms in which customers can view the exterior and interior of available vehicles. Airplane manufacturers use virtual prototypes to test new models and shorten product design time. Many firms use personal computer-based VR applications for employee training (Shelly Cashman Series ®Microsoft Word 2000 Project 2). As computing power and the use of ...