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Virtual Reality (VR) is an environment that is simulated by a computer. Most virtual reality environments are primarily visual experiences, displayed either on a computer screen or through special stereoscopic displays, but some simulations include additional sensory information, such as sound through speakers or headphones. Some advanced and experimental systems have included limited tactile, haptic force feedback. Users can interact with a virtual environment either through the use of standard input devices such as a keyboard and mouse, or through multimodal devices such as a wired glove, polhemus boom arm, and/or omnidirectional treadmill. The simulated environment can be similar to the real world, for example, simulations for pilot or combat training, or it can differ significantly from reality, as in VR games. In practice, it is very difficult to create a high-fidelity virtual reality experience, due largely to technical limitations on processing power and image resolution.

Background

Terminology

The origin of the term "virtual reality" is uncertain though it has been credited to The Judas Mandala, a 1982 novel by Damien Broderick where the context of use is somewhat different from that defined above. A related term coined by Myron Krueger, "artificial reality", has been in use since the 1970s. "Cyberspace" dates to the 1982 short story "Burning Chrome" and 1984 novel Neuromancer by the cyberpunk author William Gibson. The concept of virtual reality was popularized in mass media by movies as The Lawnmower Man (and others mentioned below), and the VR research boom of the 1990s was motivated in part by the non-fiction book Virtual Reality by Howard Rheingold. The book served to demystify the heretofore niche area, making it more accessible to less technical researchers and enthusiasts, with an impact similar to what his book The Virtual Community had on virtual community research lines closely related to VR.

While virtual reality originally denoted a fully immersive tethered system, the term has since been used to describe systems lacking wired gloves etc., such as those driven by VRML and X3D on the World Wide Web and occasionally even text-based interactive systems such as MOOs or MUDs. Non-immersive virtual reality uses a normal monitor, and the person manipulates the virtual environment using a keyboard, a mouse, a joystick or a similar input device. The term was used in the early 1990s to denote 3D computer and video games, particularly first-person shooters.

VR Timeline

Morton Heilig wrote in the 1950s of an "Experience Theater" that could encompass all the senses in an effective manner, thus drawing the viewer into the onscreen activity. He built a prototype of his vision dubbed the Sensorama in 1962, along with five short films to be displayed in it while engaging multiple senses (sight, sound, smell, and touch). Predating digital computing, the Sensorama was a mechanical device, which reportedly still functions today. In 1968, Ivan Sutherland, with the help of his student Bob Sproull, created what is widely considered to be the first Virtual Reality and Augmented Reality (AR) Head Mounted Display (HMD) system. It was primitive both in terms of user interface and realism, and the HMD to be worn by the user was so heavy it had to be suspended from the ceiling, and the graphics comprising the virtual environment were simple wireframe rooms. The formidable appearance of the device inspired its name, The Sword of Damocles. Also notable among the earlier hypermedia and virtual reality systems was the Aspen Movie Map, which was created at MIT in 1977. The program was a crude virtual simulation of Aspen, Colorado in which users could wander the streets in one of three modes: summer, winter, and polygons. The first two were based on photographs – the researchers actually photographed every possible movement through the city's street grid in both seasons – and the third was a basic 3-D model of the city. In the late 1980s the term "virtual reality" was popularized by Jaron Lanier, one of the modern pioneers of the field. Lanier had founded the company VPL Research (from "Virtual Programming Languages") in 1985, which developed and built some of the seminal "goggles n' gloves" systems of that decade.

Impact

There has been increasing interest in the potential social impact of new technologies, such as virtual reality (as may be seen in utopian literature, within the social sciences, and in popular culture). Perhaps most notably, Mychilo Stephenson Cline, in his book, Power, Madness, and Immortality: The Future of Virtual Reality, argues that virtual reality will lead to a number of important changes in human life and activity. He argues that:

• Virtual reality will be integrated into daily life and activity and will be used in very human ways.
• Techniques will be developed to influence human behavior, interpersonal communication, and cognition (i.e., virtual genetics).
• As we spend more and more time in virtual space, there will be an gradual “migration to virtual space,” resulting in important changes in economics, worldview, and culture.
• The design of virtual environments may be used to extend basic human rights into virtual space, to promote human freedom and well-being, and to promote social stablity as we move from one stage in socio-political development to the next.

Public Perception

The general public’s fascination and expectations of the Virtual Reality field and applications have been greatly influenced by the coverage it has received in the mass media (see Mass Media section below). The high expectations raised from the coverage, and from movies such as The Lawnmower Man have led to disappointment and ambivalence concerning VR and its value to the individual. VR’s success in the entertainment marketplace has been uneven at best, in part driven by disappointment with the reality of virtual reality versus the mass media notions and because the cost still after decades is nearly prohibitive for immersive equipment owners, forcing them to pass the cost onto the users of the equipment—and the experience using contemporary VR equipment still has not demonstrated it is superior to satisfaction gained from other entertainment alternatives of similar or lesser cost.

To date, the exceptions in the public sector have been theme parks and similar venues and video gaming (with a population willing to engage with the imaginary environments on the developers' terms). However, the public seems more than willing to embrace VR as a common media, provided the experience provided matches up to tremendously high expectations created by illusions of what VR could be provided by movies and television alongside actual news coverage. For the technology to work well enough to support a business model, it must break through the "novelty barrier" with a killer application to commoditize the industry. With the goal of ideal simulated reality itself possibly unattainable, virtual reality technologies have found their best success in industry where they line up with pre-existing business needs. To be able to mock up the physical world with relatively high fidelity is difficult but technically feasible, to be able to mock up a person’s perception/imagination to the same level is a task far more complex.

Mass Media

Mass media has been a great advocate and perhaps a great hindrance to its development over the years. During the research “boom” of the late 1980s into the 1990s the news media’s prognostication on the potential of VR--and potential overexposure in publishing the predictions of anyone who had one (whether or not that person had a true perspective on the technology and its limits)--built up the expectations of the technology so high as to be impossible to achieve under the technology then or any technology to date. Entertainment media reinforced these concepts with furturistic imagery many generations beyond contemporary capabilities.

Fiction Books

Many science fiction books and movies have imagined characters being "trapped in virtual reality". The first modern work to use this idea was Daniel F. Galouye's novel Simulacron-3, which was made into a German teleplay titled Welt am Draht ("World on a Wire"). Other science fiction books have promoted the idea of virtual reality as a partial, but not total, substitution for the misery of reality (in the sense that a pauper in the real world can be a prince in VR), or have touted it as a method for creating breathtaking virtual worlds in which people would regularly live, play and socialize. One of the best examples of both ideas was Neal Stephenson's novel Snow Crash. However, in 2003, Stephenson admitted to Wired magazine that Snow Crash was a "failed prophecy." An early short science fiction story - "The Veldt" - about an all too real 'virtual reality" was included in the 1951 book The Illustrated Man, by Ray Bradbury and may be the first fictional work to fully describe the concept.

Television

The first major television series to showcase virtual reality was Star Trek: The Next Generation. They featured the holodeck, a virtual reality facility, generally on star ships and star bases, that enabled its users to recreate and experience anything they wanted. One difference from current virtual reality technology, however, was that replicators and transporters were used to actually create and place objects in the holodeck, rather than relying solely on the illusion of physical objects, as is done today.

Motion Pictures

Steven Lisberger's film TRON was the first mainstream Hollywood picture to explore the idea, which was popularized more recently by the Wachowski brothers in 1999's The Matrix. The Matrix was significant in that it presented virtual reality and reality as often overlapping, and sometimes indistinguishable. Cyberspace became something that most movies completely misunderstood, as seen in The Lawnmower Man and Hackers (film). Also, the British comedy Red Dwarf utilized in several episodes the idea that life (or at least the life seen on the show) is a virtual reality game. This idea was also used in Spy Kids 3-D: Game Over.

The popular classic of The Matrix is about the world of the future, where most of the human species is kept docile by a race of sentient machines (which humankind created) in a "Virtual Reality" computer program called The Matrix. The machines use their human population as energy generators feeding off them as their brains act out their lives completely oblivious of the real world while inside the Matrix.

Games

In the Mage: The Ascension role-playing game, the mage tradition of the Virtual Adepts is presented as the real creators of VR. The Adepts' ultimate objective is to move into virtual reality, scrapping their physical bodies in favour of improved virtual ones. Also, the .hack series centers around a virtual reality video game.

Marketing

A side effect of the chic image that has been cultivated for Virtual Reality in the media is that advertising and merchandise have been associated with VR over the years to take advantage of the buzz. This is often seen in product tie-ins with cross-media properties, especially gaming licenses, with varying degrees of success. The NES Power Glove from the 1980s was an early example. Marketing ties between VR and video games are not to be unexpected, given that much of the progress in 3D computer graphics and virtual environment development (traditional hallmarks of VR) has been driven by the gaming industry over the last decade.

Challenges

Virtual reality has been heavily criticized for being an inefficient method for navigating non-geographical information. At present, the idea of ubiquitous computing is very popular in user interface design, and this may be seen as a reaction against VR and its problems. In reality, these two kinds of interfaces have totally different goals and are complementary. The goal of ubiquitous computing is to bring the computer into the user's world, rather than force the user to go inside the computer. The current trend in VR is actually to merge the two user interfaces to create a fully immersive and integrated experience. See simulated reality for a discussion of what might have to be considered if a flawless virtual reality technology was possible.

Pioneers and Notables

See also

References and Notes

• Brooks Jr., F. P. (1999). "What's Real About Virtual Reality?", IEEE Computer Graphics And Applications, 19(6), 16
• Burdea, G. and P. Coffet (2003). Virtual Reality Technology, Second Edition. Wiley-IEEE Press.
• Kalawsky, R. S. (1993). The Science of Virtual Reality and Virtual Environments: A Technical, Scientific and Engineering Reference on Virtual Environments, Addison-Wesley, Wokingham, England ; Reading, Mass.
• Kelly, K., A. Heilbrun and B. Stacks (1989). "Virtual Reality; an Interview with Jaron Lanier", Whole Earth Review, Fall 1989, no. 64, pp. 108(12)
• Krueger, M. W. (1991). Artificial Reality II, Addison-Wesley, Reading, Massachusetts
• Lanier, J., and F. Biocca (1992). “An Insider's View of the Future of Virtual Reality.” Journal of Communication, 42(4), 150
• Rheingold, H. (1992). Virtual Reality, Simon & Schuster, New York, N.Y.
• Robinett, W. (1994). “Interactivity and Individual Viewpoint in Shared Virtual Worlds: The Big Screen vs. Networked Personal Displays.” Computer Graphics, 28(2), 127
• Slater, M., Usoh, M.(1993). “The Influence of a Virtual Body on Presence in Immersive Virtual Environments” Virtual Reality International 93, Proceedings of the Third Annual Conference on Virtual Reality, London, April 1993, pages 34--42. Meckler, 1993
• Stanney, K. M. ed. (2002). Handbook of Virtual Environments: Design, Implementation, and Applications. Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Inc., Mahwah, New Jersey
• Sutherland, I. E. (1965). "The Ultimate Display". Proceedings of IFIP 65, vol 2, pp. 506-508
• Goslin, M, and Morie, J. F., (1996). "Virtopia" Emotional experiences in Virtual Environments", Leonardo, vol. 29, no. 2, pp. 95-100.

External links

Information and Commentary

• VRoot.org: Virtual Reality News/Resources edited by and for the VR Community
• VR Lecture Matrials by Professor Wayne E. Carlson, Ohio State
• Science@NASA Article:"Whatever Happened to...Virtual Reality?
• Virtual reality at Future Wiki - Speculation and overview of future developments.

Research Centers

• Advanced Displays and Spatial Perception Laboratories at NASA Ames
• Effective Virtual Environments (EVE) Research Group at UNC
• Electronic Visualization Laboratory (EVL) at UIC
• Graphics, Visualization and Usability (GVU) Center at Georgia Tech
• Human Interface Technology Lab (HIT Lab) at UW
• PERCRO Lab (PERCeptual RObotics) at Scuola Superiore Sant'Anna, Pisa, Italy
• Virtual Reality Applications Center at Iowa State University
• Vision, Imaging and Virtual Environments Research Group (VIVE) at department of Computer Science, University College London

Equipment and Resources

• Virtual Reality Articles at VResources
• Complete listing of commercially available VR Hardware at Tek Gear

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