Which do you remember better – the city in the chapter on geography that you read just last week, or the location of the vacation that you took many months back? I bet it is the vacation! The reason for this is that physically experiencing something makes it way more memorable than merely reading about it. Now what if you could experience your geography lessons in much the same way?
That is the promise of virtual reality. Virtual reality is all about computers giving you the illusion that you are no longer, say in your living room, but rather in a computer generated virtual world. The goal of virtual reality is to make this virtual world as real and as convincing as possible – hence the name virtual reality.
To experience virtual reality, you don a pair of special goggles, like say the Oculus Rift, that completely blocks out the external world. The real world is replaced in the goggles by a pair of screens – one in front of each eye. Each screen presents the corresponding eye with what it would have seen, had it been looking at the same scene, not in a virtual world, but in the real world. This gives your brain the illusion that you are viewing a real 3 dimensional scene. The googles take the illusion even further – as you move your head around, sensors in the goggles detect the movement of your head and the scene changes to account for your new head position. Further, in this virtual world, you have a virtual body, including virtual arms. A camera on the goggles track your real hand and the software makes your virtual arm mimic the movements of your real arm, giving you the ability to touch objects in the virtual world by moving your real hand.
A person playing a shooting computer game wearing the Oculus Rift goggles. The goggles completely cover the wearers eyes. On the lower right you see the images on the two screens in the Oculus Rift. You can also see the virtual gun in the image being held by the users virtual hand.
Creating this illusion is the result of a lot of team work. The producer of the experience defines the concept for the virtual world. A digital artist then creates the world in a 3D authoring tool like Maya. A computer programmer then takes that virtual world and wires it up so that the goggles can sense the wearers movements and adjust the virtual world.
All of this is technology on the cutting edge. Look for it to become more mainstream in the next few years.
Nikhil's Musings 