Virtual Reality - Virtually
HereWhat is virtual reality (VR), and what is it not? After looking at and working with an enormous range of products, some claiming to be VR and some not, we've come up with a few definitions. Virtual reality lets you navigate and view a world of three dimensions in real time, with six degrees of freedom (6DOF): the freedom to move and look forward and backward, left and right, or up and down.
In essence, virtual reality is a clone of physical reality. In life, you exist in three dimensions, you experience real time, and you have the ability to interact with the world around you. VR products mimic those conditions, even getting to the point where you can "touch" objects in a virtual world and have them respond or change according to your actions.
The key here is interactivity, not gadgetry. Virtual reality is defined by this minimum level of interactivity, and it isn't surprising that interactivity is the key. A physicist will tell you that interaction is the fundamental unit of physical reality.
How you interact defines a VR experience, but how you interface with it enhances that experience. In its most basic form, you interface with a virtual world with your regular PC monitor; it serves as a window into that world. You can enhance your experience with additional technology that enables the virtual world to emerge from the screen into the room. And with a head mounted display (HMD) or a CAVE (Cave Automatic Virtual Environment) as your visual interface, your view of the space around you is replaced by a virtual space which changes as you move around. Looking up and seeing a virtual sky, or looking down and seeing virtual ground, you're immersed in virtual reality. If you use a CAVE, you can get a complete sense of immersion. You use projection devices to create cave-like surroundings, incorporating the walls and ceiling around you.
When we observe a user immersed in VR, the specialized equipment dominates our view. To the immersed user however, all this hardware becomes invisible, playing a supporting role by enhancing the user's experience of freedom in the virtual space. Freedom is what VR is all about.
Virtual space can simulate a real space or an object. An architect can easily allow a client to walk through the model of a proposed building in real time. The difference between this scenario and a traditional presentation shouldn't be taken lightly. In viewing blueprints, still renditions, or even a pre-rendered animation that flies through a model, the client's experience is totally passive. With VR, the presentation is interactive: The client drives the show and is an involved participant.
A facilities planner and customer can configure a space together, dragging and dropping machinery, office equipment, and movable wall systems around. They can even experiment with colors, textures, and lighting. This technique is applicable to retail and factory planning and general product and package design. Movie and TV producers can use VR for designing sets and storyboards.
With more sophisticated VR software, you can model machinery, vehicles, and devices, simulating the behavior of the actual equipment. This saves dollars and development cycles before a product introduction and provides training sessions with the virtual product when the real product is scarce or prohibitively expensive. Many companies are exploiting VR for these uses on the PC platform today.
Field trips through VR are another great idea. Whether you want to explore an ancient ruin, learn geography by walking the terrain, or tour the space shuttle, VR is the next best thing to being there.
Virtual space can also bring new worlds to life. For example, an industrial chemist could use Autodesk's Cyberspace Developer Kit to test molecular bonding sites for new drugs. Game makers regularly use VR to create imaginary worlds for fictional adventures.
Things get really interesting when you start to use VR dimensions to represent non-spacial quantities and qualities. vrTrader, a VR application, is one such package: It metaphorically turns financial data, stocks, markets, and trading activity into objects in 3D space. vrTrader is available from Avatar Partners Inc. (800-307-3254), and was built using Sense8's WorldToolKit. The list price is normally $495, but will be $395 for an unspecified length of time.
Spreadsheets and graphs in the 2D world of DOS and Windows enabled millions of users to "see" what had been invisible before. 3D visualization of financial data in virtual space multiplies your ability to "see" and interact with data as it changes moment by moment.
VR is more than an enhancement for a few specific applications: It can lead to a better way of computing. Operating systems and data structures that are currently based on two-dimensional files and folders, will soon be based on objects. You won't just pop open folders; if you want to, you'll be able to walk through a virtual office and open virtual filing cabinets. And this is just the beginning. Programming languages have already blazed this trail. The interface is sure to follow.
An equally exciting opportunity awaits the users and developers of multimedia as VR takes them into the 3rd dimension. Hypertext becomes an adventure of portaling between worlds, video emerges from its box becoming integrated into a scene, and the talent-demanding tasks of drawing, painting, and making clip-art look good is replaced by bold, flying 3D text, quality 3D clip-models beautifully shaded under dramatic lighting, and textures you can virtually feel. Whether its a presentation for sales or marketing, a point of sale kiosk, or a training application, VR takes multimedia into a new dimension of user involvement and collaboration.
Suddenly, surprisingly, virtual reality on the PC platform is no longer a pipe dream. The chasm between multimillion dollar proprietary systems and virtual reality products available for the PC is closing fast. While there isn't yet a wealth of PC-based applications available, the toolkits to build them and the hardware to experience them are here now.
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Updated Jan 28, 1998