Virtual Reality – Welcome To The Age Of Digital Magic

Virtual Reality, as you may guess from the term, is an experience of anything you want brought to you, wherever you want. It is a technology which can simulate any environment for you at your home using a pair of VR glasses (yes, that’s the acronym for Virtual Reality) and some other devices simulating other senses of the human body.

One may mistake this technology as just another breakthrough in the world of entertainment and gaming. But Virtual Reality has proved that it’s here to stay with its applications being found in various fields making it a lot more useful than you think. Let’s have a look how Virtual Reality has proven to be useful in the past few years:-

1.Your Life made Virtual

With the acquisition of Oculus, Facebook has made clear that it has huge plans for the tech. The company CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, plans to create a virtual environment in which you can meet your friends, play board games with them just as you would in real life (it would just be virtually real ;-).

2.Virtual Reality in Medical Science

Virtual Reality can enable real time internal view of a patients internals making the job of surgeons easy and boosting their confidence.

3.Explore more with VR

You can now visit the Amazon Jungle while sitting on your sofa and that too with the eyes of a tiny primate. Tarsier Goggles enables a person to see through the eyes of a tarsier.

4.No more phobias

Do you have phobia? Are you afraid of height, or water maybe? Worry no more as treatment of phobias has been now made easy with therapies with the help of Virtual Reality.

As of now eithervirtual reality headsetsor big screens are used to images, sounds and other sensations that simulate an environment. A person using virtual reality is able to look around the artificial world, move in it, and even interact with virtual items.

Ahead-mounted display (HMD) is capable of playing 360 degree video by tracking head movements of the person who is wearing it. AnHMD may incorporate two small high resolutionscreens or lenses which need a display projecting through them (generally a smartphone).

Major Breakthroughs in the Technology

1960s

Morton Hailig built a prototype of his vision dubbed theSensoramain 1962, along with five short films to be displayed in it.

1970-1990

In this time duration VR devices were used for military medical facilities and flight simulation technologies and automobile industries.

1990-2000

In 1991,Segaannounced theSega VRheadset forarcade gamesand theMega Driveconsole.

2000s

In 2001, SAS Cube (SAS3) became the first PC-based cubic room, developed by Z-A Production. It was installed inFrance.

2010s

In 2010 a scientist named Palmer Luckey designed and provided the first prototype of the Oculus Rift(VR box). The distortion issues that were arising from the lens used to create the field of vision and were corrected for by software written byJohn Carmackfor a version of DOOM 3 .

VR headset for PlayStation 4

2015 marked the launch of Google Cardboard a do-it-yourself stereoscopic viewer: the user places theirsmartphonein the cardboard holder, which they wear on their head. This technology was further adopted by many companies as the only requirement for making such a headset is lenses. A costly display wasn’t required hence, the final product was way cheaper than traditional VR headsets.

HTC too jumped in the VR bandwagon with their HTC Vive headset in the same year.

By 2016 there have been at least 230 companies developing VR projects including the giants like Amazon, Google, Apple, Facebook Microsoft and Sony.

Conclusion

With its fast paced development and usability in various fields like medical, military, entertainment… the list is endless it won’t be wrong to say that VR is going be a part ofeveryone’s life like Computers and Smartphones are. It wouldn’t be a surprise that all of us would be taking our daily dose of entertainment on a VR headset rather than a smartphone or a TV or any screen for that matter.