Virtual reality (VR)

The computer-generated simulation of a three-dimensional image or environment that can be interacted with in a seemingly real or physical way by a person using special electronic equipment, such as a helmet with a screen inside or gloves fitted with sensors is called as the virtual reality.
Virtual reality can recreate sensory experiences, which include virtual taste,sight,smell, sound,touch, etc.
Virtual reality is the use of computer technology to create the effect of an interactive three-dimensional world in which the objects have a sense of spatial presence.
Virtual reality is often used to describe a wide variety of applications commonly associated with immersive, highly visual, 3D environments. The development of CAD software,graphics hardware acceleration,head mounted displays,datagloves and miniaturization have helped popularise the notion.In the book The Metaphysics of Virtual Reality by michael R.heim, seven different concepts of virtual reality are identified: simulation, interaction, artificiality, immersion,telepresence, full body immersion,and network communication. People often identify VR with head mounted displays and data suits
Most current virtual reality environments are primarily empirical experiences, displayed either on a computer screen or with special stereoscopic displays, and some regulated simulations include additional sensory information and emphasise real sound through speakers or headphones targeted towards witnesses. Some advanced, haptic systems now include tactile information, generally known as force feedback in medical, gaming and military applications. Furthermore, virtual reality covers remote communication environments which provide virtual presence of users with the concepts of telepresence and telexistence or a virtual artifact (VA) either through the use of standard input devices such as a keyboard and mouse, or through multimodal devices such as a wired glove, the Polhemus, and omnidirectional treadmills. The simulated environment can be similar to the real world in order to create a lifelike experience—for example, in simulations for pilot or combat training—or it differs significantly from reality, such as in VR games. In practice, it is currently very difficult to create a high-fidelity virtual reality experience, because of technical limitations on processing power, image resolution, and communication bandwidth. However, the technology's proponents hope that such limitations overcome processor, imaging, and disk communication and become more powerful with cost effectiveness over time.
Virtual reality can be divided into:
The simulation of a real environment for training and education.
The development of an imagined environment for a game or interactive story.
Virtual Reality (VR) vs. Augmented Reality (AR)
The promise of virtual reality has always been enormous. Put on these goggles, go nowhere, and be transported anywhere. It’s the same escapism peddled by drugs, alcohol, sex, and art — throw off the shackles of the mundane through a metaphysical transportation to an altered state. Born of technology, virtual reality at its core is an organic experience. Yes, it’s man meets machine, but what happens is strictly within the mind.
It had its crude beginnings. A definition of virtual reality has always been difficult to formulate — the concept of an alternative existence has been pawed at for centuries — but the closest modern ancestor came to life in the fifties, when a handful of visionaries saw the possibility for watching things on a screen that never ends, but the technology wasn’t yet good enough to justify the idea. The promise of the idea was shrouded, concealed under clunky visuals. But the concept was worth pursuing, and others did (especially the military, who have used virtual reality technology for war simulation for years). The utopian ideals of a VR universe were revisited by a small crew of inventors in the late ’80s and early ’90s. At the time the personal computer was exploding, and VR acolytes found a curious population eager to see what the technology had to offer.
Not enough, it turned out. Though a true believer could immerse him or herself in the roughly built digital landscape, the chasm between that crude digital experience and the powerful subtly of real life was too great. The vision simply did not match the means. In the mid-’90s, VR as an industry basically closed up shop. Though still used in the sciences, those eager to bring VR to the masses found themselves overshadowed by a glitzier, more promising technological revolution: the internet.
Then, two years ago, Palmer Luckey, a kid born during the waning days of VR’s late-20th-century golden era, put the pieces together using improved technology. He raised some money and soon developed the Oculus Rift, his own version of a clunky headset. The graphics were still basic but the experience was, surprisingly, lifelike. For the first time ever, one could casually wander through a comically realistic rendering of Jerry Seinfeld’s apartment. Or hack a zombie to death. It didn’t really matter what you did inside the goggles, really, just the act of immersion was awing. Someone at Facebook got the memo, and they purchased Oculus wholesale for $2 billion, signaling a promising, if unclear, future for virtual reality.
Imagine 10 years ago trying to envision the way we use cellphones today. It’s impossible. That’s the promise VR has today. VR at its best shouldn’t replace real life, just modify it, giving us access to so much just out of reach physically, economically. If you can dream it, VR can make it. It’s a medium for progress, not the progress itself. In celebration of the rise of VR still to come, The Verge investigated its past, present, and future to offer a glimpse of what we feel is enormous possibility.
The Rise and Fall and Rise of Virtual Reality was created by Katie Drummond, Ellis Hamburger, Thomas Houston, Ted Irvine, Uy Tieu, Rebecca Lai, Dylan Lathrop, Christian Mazza, Casey Newton, Adi Robertson, Matthew Schnipper, Melissa Smith, Sam Thonis, and Michael Zelenko.

VOICES FROM A PAST VIRTUAL
When Facebook bought virtual reality company Oculus in early 2014, virtual reality blew up. While game and movie studios began reimagining the future, others looked back at the “old days” of VR — a loosely remembered period in the 1990s when gloves and goggles were super cool and everyone was going to get high on 3D graphics. But things were never so simple. We spoke to 18 key VR innovators about their work and dreams. What follows is over two decades of memories and visions for what the future could be.
Some people identify the birth of virtual reality in rudimentary Victorian “stereoscopes,” the first 3D picture viewers. Others might point to any sort of out-of-body experience. But to most, VR as we know it was created by a handful of pioneers in the 1950s and 1960s. In 1962, after years of work, filmmaker Mort Heilig patented what might be the first true VR system: the Sensorama, an arcade-style cabinet with a 3D display, vibrating seat, and scent producer. Heilig imagined it as one in a line of products for the “cinema of the future,” but that future failed to materialize in his lifetime.

In 1965, Ivan Sutherland — already known as the creator of groundbreaking computer interface Sketchpad — conceived of what he termed “The Ultimate Display,” or, as he wrote, “a room within which the computer can control the existence of matter.” He demonstrated an extremely preliminary iteration of such a device, a periscope-like video headset called the “Sword of Damocles,” in 1968.

Meanwhile, at the Wright–Patterson Air Force Base in Ohio, military engineer Thomas Furness was designing a new generation of flight simulators, working on a multi-decade project that eventually became the hallmark program known as the Super Cockpit.

A few years later, in the late ’60s, an artist and programmer named Myron Krueger would begin creating a new kind of experience he termed “artificial reality,” and attempt to revolutionize how humans interacted with machines.
"“It just seemed to me that I was important and the computer wasn’t."
Virtual Reality: Advantages and Disadvantages

Advantages:

Can be used in hospitals to provide training to doctors(1).

Used in military so provide war and battle situations (2).

It is the technology of the future and is constantly growing

Its uses have given the gaming industry a new light (3).

Virtual reality is now being integrated everywhere

Disadvantages:

Virtual Reality equipments is very pricey.

The new technology can not be used by everyone.

It is limited to people who have good eyesight (in some systems glasses are not allowed)

Virtual reality technology has been associated with weight gain because people do not leave their house.

Only large companies have access to current technology.

1. How Virtual Reality Works
What do you think of when you hear the words virtual reality(VR)? Do you imagine someone wearing a clunky helmet attached to a computer with a thick cable? Do visions of crudely rendered pterodactyls haunt you? Do you think of Neo and Morpheus traipsing about the Matrix? Or do you wince at the term, wishing it would just go away?

If the last applies to you, you're likely a computer scientist orengineer, many of whom now avoid the words virtual reality even while they work on technologies most of us associate with VR. Today, you're more likely to hear someone use the words virtual environment (VE) to refer to what the public knows as virtual reality. We'll use the terms interchangeably in this article.

Naming discrepancies aside, the concept remains the same - using computer technology to create a simulated, three-dimensional world that a user can manipulate and explore while feeling as if he were in that world. Scientists, theorists and engineers have designed dozens of devices and applications to achieve this goal. Opinions differ on what exactly constitutes a true VR experience, but in general it should include:
- Three-dimensional images that appear to be life-sized from the perspective of the user
- The ability to track a user's motions, particularly his head and eye movements, and correspondingly adjust the images on the user's display to reflect the change in perspective
In this article, we'll look at the defining characteristics of VR, some of the technology used in VR systems, a few of its applications, some concerns about virtual reality and a brief history of the discipline. In the next section, we'll look at how experts define virtual environments, starting with immersion.
The possibility exists to have films and television programmes which are watched with a head-mounted display and computer control of the image so that the viewer appears to be inside the scene with the action going all round. The computer presents the view which corresponds to the direction the viewer is facing, through a system of head-tracking. This would give the viewers the feeling that they are actually going to the scene in person instead of looking at pictures on a screen. The term "virtual space" has been suggested as more specific for this technology.

Multimedia: from Wagner to Virtual Reality, edited by Randall Packer and Ken Jordan and first published in 2001, explores the term and its history from an avant-garde perspective. Philosophical implications of the concept of VR are discussed in books including Philip Zhai's Get Real: A Philosophical Adventure in Virtual Reality (1998) andand Digital Sensations: Space, Identity and Embodiment in Virtual Reality (1999), written by Ken Hillis.

2013: Nintendo files a patent for the concept of using VR technology to produce a more realistic 3D effect on a 2D television. A camera on the TV tracks the viewer's location relative to the TV, and if the viewer moves, everything on the screen reorients itself appropriately. "For example, if you were looking at a forest, you could shift your head to the right to discover someone standing behind a tree."
2014 : Facebook purchases a company that makes virtual reality headsets, Oculus VR, for $2 billion. Sony announces Project Morpheus, a virtual reality headset for the PS4.Google announces Cardboard, a do-it-yourself stereoscopic viewer for smartphones

IMPACT

There has been an increase in interest in the potential social impact of new technologies, such as virtual reality. In the book Infinite Reality: Avatars, Eternal Life, New Worlds, and the Dawn of the Virtual Revolution, Blascovich and Bailenson review the literature on the psychology and sociology behind life in virtual reality.

In addition, Mychilo S. 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 various human ways. Another such speculation has been written up on how to reach ultimate happiness via virtual reality.
- Techniques will be developed to influence human behavior, interpersonal communication, and cognition.
- As we spend more and more time in virtual space, there will be a gradual "migration to virtual space", resulting in important changes in economics, worldview, and culture.
Use of VR technology
The use of VR in heritage and archaeology has potential in museum and visitor centre applications, but its use has been tempered by the difficulty in presenting a "quick to learn" real time experience to numerous people at any given time. Many historic reconstructions tend to be in a pre-rendered format to a shared video display, thus allowing more than one person to view a computer generated world, but limiting the interaction that full-scale VR can provide.^{[citation needed]} The first use of a VR presentation in a heritage application was in 1994, when a museum visitor interpretation provided an interactive "walk-through" of a 3D reconstruction of Dudley Castle in England as it was in 1550. This consisted of a computer controlled laserdisc-based system designed by British based engineer Colin Johnson. The system was featured in a conference held by the British Museum in November 1994, and in the subsequent technical paper, Imaging the Past - Electronic Imaging and Computer Graphics in Museums and Archaeology
Motion pictures
Radio
In 2009, British digital radio station BBC Radio 7 broadcast Planet B, a science-fiction drama set in a virtual world.

Fine art

David Em was the first fine artist to create navigable virtual worlds in the 1970s. His early work was done on mainframes at Information International, Inc., Jet Propulsion Laboratory, and California Institute of Technology. Jeffrey Shaw explored the potential of VR in fine arts with early works like Legible City (1989), Virtual Museum (1991), andGolden Calf (1994).

Games

The use of graphics, sound and input technology in video games can be incorporated into VR. Several Virtual Reality head mounted displays (HMD) were released for gaming during the early-mid 1990s. These included the Virtual Boy developed by Nintendo, the iGlasses developed by Virtual I-O, the Cybermaxx developed by Victormaxx and the VFX-1 developed by Forte Technologies. And then there was Virtuality (gaming) and countless number of narrow VR systems in video arcades for racing, flight, and shooter games which are still thriving in the 2010s. These arcade games only simulate certain aspects of reality and therefore simplified. Other modern examples of narrow VR for gaming include the Wii Remote, the Kinect, and the PlayStation Move/PlayStation Eye, all of which track and send motion input of the players to the game console somewhat accurately.

Music

Immersive virtual musical instruments build on the trend in electronic musical instruments to develop new ways to control sound and perform music such as evidenced by conferences like NIMEand aim to represent musical events and sound parameters in a virtual reality in such a way that they can be perceived not only through auditory feedback, but also visually in 3D and possibly through tactile as well as haptic feedback, allowing the development of novel interaction metaphors beyond manipulation such as prehension.

Therapeutic uses

The primary use of VR in a therapeutic role is its application to various forms of exposure therapy, ranging from phobia treatments to newer approaches to treating PTSD. A very basic VR simulation with simple sight and sound models has been shown to be invaluable in phobia treatment, like zoophobia, and acrophobia, as a step between basic exposure therapy such as the use of simulacra and true exposure. A much more recent application is being piloted by the U.S. Navy to use a much more complex simulation to immerse veterans suffering from PTSD in simulations of urban combat settings. Much as in phobia treatment, exposure to the subject of the trauma or fear leads todesensitization, and a significant reduction in symptoms.

Training

VR is also used in flight simulation for the Air Force where people are trained to be pilots. The simulator would sit on top of a hydraulic lift system that reacts to the user inputs and events. When the pilot steer the aircraft, the module would turn and tilt accordingly to provide haptic feedback. The flight simulator can range from a fully enclosed module to a series of computer monitors providing the pilot's point of view. The most important reasons on using simulators over learning with a real aircraft are the reduction of transference time between land training and real flight, the safety, economy and absence of pollution. By the same token, virtual driving simulations are used to train tank drivers on the basics before allowing them to operate the real vehicle. Finally, the same goes for truck driving simulators, in which Belgian firemen are for example trained to drive in a way that prevents as much damage as possible. As these drivers often have less experience than other truck drivers, virtual reality training allows them to compensate this. In the near future, similar projects are expected for all drivers of priority vehicles, including the police.

Medical personnel are able to train through VR to deal with a wider variety of injuries.^[41] An experiment was performed by sixteen surgical residents where eight of them went through laparoscopic cholecystectomy through VR training. They then came out 29% faster at gallbladder dissection than the controlled group

Implementation

To develop a real time virtual environment, a computer graphics library can be used as embedded resource coupled with a common programming language, such as C++, Perl,Java, or Python. Some of the most popular computer graphic libraries are OpenGL, Direct3D, Java 3D, and VRML, and their use are directly influenced by the system demands in terms of performance, program purpose, and hardware platform. The use of multithreading can also accelerate 3D performance and enable cluster computing with multi-user interactivity.

Manufacturing

Virtual reality can serve to new product design, helping as an ancillary tool for engineering in manufacturing processes, new product prototypes, and simulation. Among other examples, electronic design automation, CAD, Finite Element Analysis, and computer-aided manufacturing are widely utilized programs.The use of Stereolithography and 3D printing shows how computer graphic modeling can be applied to create physical parts of real objects used in naval, aerospace, and automotive industries, which can be seen, for example, in the VR laboratory of VW in Mladá Boleslav. Beyond modeling assembly parts, 3D computer graphics techniques are currently used in the research and development of medical devices for therapies,treatments, patient monitoring,and early diagnoses of complex diseas

Urban design

3D virtual reality is becoming widely used for urban regeneration and planning and transport projects.

In 2007 development began on a virtual reality software which took design coordinate geometry used by land surveyors and civil engineers and incorporated precision spatial information created automatically by the lines and curves typically shown on subdivision plats and land surveying plans. These precise spatial areas cross referenced color and texture to an item list. The item list contained a set of controls for 3D rendering such as water reflective surface or building height. The land surface in software to create a contour map uses a digital terrain model (DTM). By 2010, prototype software was developed for the core technology to automate the process leading from design to virtualization. The first beta users in 2011 were able to press a single function and automatically drape the design or survey data over the digital terrain to create data structures that are passed into a video gaming engine to create a virtual interactive world showing massing (see picture above) of buildings in relation to man It was the first application where virtual reality was made effortless for Urban Planning principals using technology - video games, that most people under 40 years old are familiar with (in 2014). The software was improved to implement massing or 3D models from other free or commercially sold software to create more realistic virtual reality with very little time and effort (see the below image). The software is marketed as LandMentor and is the first precision design technology to make Urban Planning widely available with a short learning curve.

challenges of VR

Virtual reality technology faces a number of challenges, most of which involve motion sickness and technical matters. Users might become disoriented in a purely virtual environment, causing balance issues; computer latency might affect the simulation, providing a less-than-satisfactory end-user experience; the complicated nature of head-mounted displays and input systems such as specialized gloves and boots may require specialized training to operate, and navigating the non-virtual environment (if the user is not confined to a limited area) might prove dangerous without external sensory information.

In January 2014, Michael Abrash gave a talk on VR at Steam Dev Days. He listed all the requirements necessary to establishpresence and concluded that a great VR system will be available in 2015 or soon after. While the visual aspect of VR is close to being solved, he stated that there are other areas of VR that need solutions, such as 3D audio, haptics, body tracking, and input. However, 3D audio effects exist in games and simulate the head-related transfer function of the listener (especially using headphones). Examples include Environmental Audio Extensions (EAX), DirectSound and OpenAL.

VR audio developer Varun Nair points out that from a design perspective, sound for VR is still very much an open book. Many of the game audio design principles, especially those related to FPS games, crumble in virtual reality. He encourages more sound designers to get involved in virtual reality audio to experiment and push VR audio forward

The Future of Virtual Reality

On the current brink of Virtual Reality there is no mention of Virtual within the Virtualized World. Implementation has always stressed the excess of the actual precision of 'reality' within VR, even to the breaking point. This factoid is well discovered in the movies Existenz and the later issue at hand in The Thirteenth Floor. In Existenz, the prominent words linger forth and issue the line, "Death To Realism.

the virtual reality and the hinduism

Sunday 21 December 2014

SWAMI VIVEKANANDA, LIFE AND TEACHINGS

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Virtual reality (VR)

Virtual reality is the use of computer technology to create the effect of an interactive three-dimensional world in which the objects have a sense of spatial presence.