Virtual reality can lead to new and exciting discoveries in these areas which impact upon our day to day lives. There are a wide variety of applications for virtual reality which include: Virtual reality has many other, more serious, applications as well. The entertainment industry is after all a multi-billion dollar one and consumers are always keen on novelty. Immersive films and video games are good examples. This may seems like a lot of effort, and it is! What makes the development of virtual reality worthwhile? The potential entertainment value is clear. Where the subject really feels like they are present in that environment. If an implementation of virtual reality manages to get the combination of hardware, software and sensory synchronicity just right it achieves something known as a sense of presence. Which is what happens to some people on boats or when they read while in a car. Similarly when what your eyes and the vestibular system in your ears tell you are in conflict it can cause motion sickness. We have (more or less) 180 degrees of vision and although you are not always consciously aware of your peripheral vision, if it were gone you’d notice. For example, the human visual field does not look like a video frame. Virtual reality technology needs to take our physiology into account. These issues that divide convincing or enjoyable virtual reality experiences from jarring or unpleasant ones are partly technical and partly conceptual. This is where you’ll hear terms such as immersiveness and realism enter the conversation. If anything is even a little off we can usually tell. This is more difficult than it sounds, since our senses and brains are evolved to provide us with a finely synchronised and mediated experience. These are used to actually stimulate our senses together in order to create the illusion of reality. There are a range of systems that are used for this purpose, such as headsets, omni-directional treadmills and special gloves. How is virtual reality achieved?Īlthough we talk about a few historical early forms of virtual reality elsewhere on the site, today virtual reality is usually implemented using computer technology. That person becomes part of this virtual world or is immersed within this environment and whilst there, is able to manipulate objects or perform a series of actions. Virtual reality is the term used to describe a three-dimensional, computer generated environment which can be explored and interacted with by a person. In technical terms…Īnswering “what is virtual reality” in technical terms is straight-forward. So, in summary, virtual reality entails presenting our senses with a computer generated virtual environment that we can explore in some fashion. Something we would refer to as a virtual reality. You would be presented with a version of reality that isn’t really there, but from your perspective it would be perceived as real. It stands to reason then, that if you can present your senses with made-up information, your perception of reality would also change in response to it. In other words, our entire experience of reality is simply a combination of sensory information and our brains sense-making mechanisms for that information. These other sensory inputs, plus some special processing of sensory information by our brains ensures that we have a rich flow of information from the environment to our minds.Įverything that we know about our reality comes by way of our senses. The truth is that humans have many more senses than this, such as a sense of balance for example. These are however only our most obvious sense organs. In school we all learned that we have five senses: taste, touch, smell, sight and hearing. We know the world through our senses and perception systems. This could, of course, mean anything but it usually refers to a specific type of reality emulation. So the term ‘virtual reality’ basically means ‘near-reality’. The definition of ‘virtual’ is near and reality is what we experience as human beings. The definition of virtual reality comes, naturally, from the definitions for both ‘virtual’ and ‘reality’.
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