Virtual reality is an interactive platform for a fascinating way to travel using nothing more than the power of technology. It helps to get experience within a simulated environment that incorporates mainly auditory and visual. Virtual Reality makes it possible to experience anything, anywhere, anytime. It uses high-performance computers and sensory equipment, like headsets and gloves. We can buy devices for virtual reality in online stores as well as an electronic showroom.
It is the most immersive type of reality technology and can convince the human brain that it is somewhere it is not. With the largest technology companies on planet earth (Facebook, Google, and Microsoft) currently investing billions of dollars into virtual reality companies and startups, the future of virtual reality is set to be a pillar of our everyday lives.
Critical Elements of a Virtual Reality Experience are a virtual world, immersion, sensory feedback, interactivity. Several categories of virtual reality technologies exist, with more likely to emerge as this technology progresses. Some of them are non-immersive, semi-immersive and thoroughly immersive.
How Does Virtual Reality Work?
For the human brain to accept an artificial, virtual environment as real, it has not only to look real but also feel real. Looking real can be achieved by wearing a head-mounted display (HMD) that displays a recreated life-size, 3D virtual environment without the boundaries usually seen on TV or a computer screen. Feeling real can be achieved through handheld input devices such as motion trackers that base interactivity on the user’s movements. By stimulating many of the same senses one would use to navigate in the real world, virtual reality environments are feeling increasingly more like the natural world. Some of the examples of virtual reality are games, 3D movies, holography, adventure experience.
The thing to remember about VR is that it really isn’t a fad or fantasy waiting in the wings to whistle people off to alternative worlds; it’s a hard-edged practical technology that’s been routinely used by scientists, doctors, dentists, engineers, architects, archaeologists, and the military for about the last 30 years.
We can use virtual reality in the education field, scientific visualization, medicine, industrial design and architecture, games and entertainment.
Pros and cons of virtual reality
Like any technology, virtual reality has both good and bad points. Critics always raise the risk that alternative realities may seduce people to the end of neglecting their real-world lives—but that criticism has been leveled at everything from radio and TV to computer games and the Internet. And, at some point, it becomes a philosophical and ethical question: What is real anyway? And who is to say which the better way to pass your time is? Like many technologies, VR takes little or nothing away from the real world: you don’t have to use it if you don’t want to.
