Virtual Reality Set - News Room' title='Virtual Reality Set - News Room' />UPDATE This product is sold out. Virtual reality is finally here, but its still pretty expensive. After The Chaos more. Even though the Oculus and HTC Vive are cheaper than theyve ever. Theatre is undergoing a virtual revolution. Disclosure statement. Andrea Moneta does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or. Barcelona%E2%80%99s-TV3-hybrid-virtual-set.jpg' alt='Virtual Reality Set - News Room' title='Virtual Reality Set - News Room' />What is virtual reality A simple introductionby Chris Woodford. Last updated March 3, 2. Youll probably never go to Mars, swim with dolphins, run an. Olympic 1. 00 meters, or sing onstage with the Rolling Stones. But if. virtual reality ever lives up to its promise, you might be able to do. Unlike real reality the actual world in which we live. Apart from games and. How does it work Lets take a. Photo Virtual reality means blocking yourself off from the real world and substituting. Often, it involves wearing a wraparound headset called a head mounted display, clamping stereo headphones over your ears, and touching or feeling your way around your imaginary home using datagloves gloves with built in sensors. Picture by Wade Sisler courtesy of NASA Ames Research Center. What is virtual reality Virtual reality VR means experiencing things through our. From that simple definition, the. When you look at an amazing. Canaletto painting, for example, youre experiencing the sites and. Italy as it was about 2. In the same way, if you listen to ambient. What about losing. Surely thats a kind of virtual. If were going to understand why books, movies, paintings, and. VR fairly clearly. For the purposes of this simple, introductory article. Im going to define it as A believable, interactive 3. D computer created world that you. Putting it another way, virtual reality is essentially Believable You really need to feel like youre in your virtual world on Mars, or wherever and to. Interactive As you move around, the VR world needs to move. You can watch a 3. D movie and be transported up to the Moon. Computer generated Why is that important Because only powerful. D computer graphics, are fast enough to make. Explorable A VR world needs to be big and detailed enough for. However realistic a painting is, it shows. A book can describe a vast and complex. Immersive To be both believable and interactive, VR. Paintings by war. You can. play a flight simulator game on your home PC and be lost in a very. Artwork This Canaletto painting of Venice, Italy is believable and in some sense explorable you can move your eyes around and think about different parts of the picture, but its not interactive, computer generated, or immersive, so it doesnt meet our definition of virtual reality looking at this picture is not like being there. Virtual Reality Set - News Room' title='Virtual Reality Set - News Room' />Theres nothing to stop us making an explorable equivalent in VR, but we need CGInot oil paintsto do it. Picture courtesy of Wikimedia Commons. We can see from this why reading a book, looking at a painting. All of them offer partial glimpses of. If youre sitting in a movie theater looking at a giant. Mars on the screen, and you suddenly turn your head too. Earth and the. illusion will disappear. If you see something interesting on the. So these forms of entertainment. VR is quite different. It makes you think you are actually living. It is. two way interactive as you respond to what you see, what you see. VR changes to match your new perspective. Types of virtual realityVirtual reality has often been used as a marketing buzzword. D movies and. television programs, none of which really count as VR because they dont immerse. Search for virtual. VR. Nevertheless, things. Here are a few of the bigger variations Fully immersive. For the complete VR experience, we need three things. First, a. plausible, and richly detailed virtual world to explore a computer model. Second, a powerful computer that. Third, hardware linked to the computer that. Usually. wed need to put on whats called a head mounted display HMD with. Alternatively, we could move around inside a room, fitted out with. Well explore VR equipment in more detail in a moment. Non immersive. A highly realistic flight simulator on a home PC might qualify as. Not everyone wants or needs to be fully immersed. An architect might build a detailed 3. D. model of a new building to show to clients that can be explored on a. Most people would classify that. In the same way, computer archaeologists often create engaging 3. D. reconstructions of long lost settlements that you can move around and. They dont take you back hundreds or thousands of years or. Collaborative. What about virtual world games like Second Life and Minecraft Do they. Grey`S Anatomy Season 10 Utorrent'>Grey`S Anatomy Season 10 Utorrent. Although they meet the first four of our. But. one thing they do offer that cutting edge VR typically doesnt is. Collaboration and sharing are likely to become increasingly. VR in future. Web based. Virtual reality was one of the hottest, fastest growing. World Wide Web largely killed off interest after that. Even. though computer scientists developed a way of building virtual worlds. Web using a technology analogous to HTML called Virtual. Reality Markup Language, VRML, ordinary people were much more. Web gave them new ways to access real. With Facebooks growing interest in the technology, the future of VR. Web based and collaborative. Augmented reality. Photo Augmented reality A heads up display, like this one used by the US Air Force. Picture by Major Chad E. Gibson courtesy of US Air Force. Mobile devices like smartphones and tablets have put what used to. If were wandering round the world, maybe visiting a heritage site like the pyramids or a fascinating. Thats spawned the idea of. AR, where. for example, you point your smartphone at a. Augmented reality is all about connecting the. Web. Neither of these worlds. For example, how can a mobile device figure out its precise. How do the things you see on the screen of. Technically, these. VR systems have to. AR and VR. What equipment do we need for virtual reality Close your eyes and think of virtual reality and you probably. HMD and datagloves, wired into a powerful workstation or. What differentiates VR from an ordinary computer. PC to write an essay or play games is the. Our Secret Universe The Hidden Life Of The Cell. Where an ordinary computer uses. VR uses sensors that detect how your body is. And where a PC displays output on a screen or a printer, VR. Lets take a quick tour through some of the more. VR input and output devices. Head mounted displays HMDsPhoto The view from inside. A typical HMD has two tiny screens. D stereoscopic image. Picture by courtesy of US Air Force. There are two big differences between VR and looking at an. VR, you see a 3. D image that changes. Thats made possible. The two screens display slightly different, stereoscopic. D perspective of the virtual world. HMDs usually also have built in. The trouble with HMDs is that theyre. But HMDs dont have to be so elaborate. Google. has developed an affordable, low cost pair of cardboard goggles. HMD. Immersive rooms. An alternative to putting on an HMD is to sit or stand inside a. As you. move in the room, the images change accordingly. Flight simulators. A famous 1. 99. 0s VR experiment called. CAVE Cave Automatic Virtual Environment, developed at the. University of Illinois by Thomas de Fanti, also worked this way. People moved around inside a large cube shaped room with. Although they didnt have to wear HMDs, they did need. D perception. Datagloves. See something amazing and your natural instinct is to reach out. So giving people the ability to. VR. Usually. this is done using datagloves, which are ordinary gloves with sensors. One technical. method of doing this uses fiber optic cables stretched the length of. Each cable has tiny cuts in it so, as you flex your. A photocell at. the end of the cable measures how much light reaches it and the. Other gloves use strain gauges, piezoelectric sensors, or.