VIRTUAL REALITY IS WELL KNOWN for its use with flight simulators and games. However, these are only two of the many ways virtual reality is being used today. This article will summarize how virtual reality is used in medicine, architecture, weather simulation, chemistry and the visualization of voxel data. In addition, links to web pages where other uses of virtual reality are detailed are included at the end of this article.
Medicine
Mark Billinghurst, at the Hit Lab in Washington, has developed a prototype surgical assistant for simulation of paranasal surgery.
During a simulated operation the system provides vocal and visual feedback to the user, and warns the surgeon when a dangerous action is about to take place. In addition to training, the expert assistant can be used during the actual operation to provide feedback and guidance. This is very useful when the surgeon's awareness of the situation is limited due to complex anatamoy.
Finally, Billinghurst and his associates are working at developing a toolkit for physicians which will help them create their own expert assistants for other types of surgery.
Architecture
The department of visualization and virtual reality at the IGD University in Germany has developed a program that uses radiosity and raytracing to simulate light. This virtual reality program has applications in the area of architecture and light engineering.
With light simulation architects can examine how outdoor light will fall inside and outside their building before it is built. If the lighting needs to be redesigned, the architect can redesign the building on the computer and examine the new outdoor light effects.
In addition to outdoor light, lighting engineers use virtual reality to examine the effects of point lights, spotlights and other indoor light sources. An interior designer could examine how light will affect different room arrangements.
Weather Simulation
Fraunhaufer-IGD has developed a visualization system for weather forecasting called "TriVis". TriVis accepts data from meteorological services such as satellite data, statistically corrected forecast data, precipitation data and fronts information. It then analyzes this data and uses fractal functions to create projections of storm systems.
Using TriVis to visualize artificial clouds, meteorologists can predict weather with increased accuracy.
The data gathered and analyzed by the TriVis system is used by television weather reporters to show their audiences storm systems. TriVis has been used in television weather forecasts since 1993.
Chemistry
Real Mol is a program that uses virtual reality to show molecular models in an interactive, immersive environment. The scientist who uses the program wears a cyberglove and a head mounted display to interact with the molecular system. Using RealMol scientists can move molecules or protein chains to create new molecules. This is useful in fields such as drug design.
RealMol displays molecules in three ways: ball and stick model, stick model and CPK model. The molecules are rendered through a molecular dynamics simulation program.
Voxel Data
ISVAS is an interactive software program that is utilized to analyze 3D and voxel data. It was developed by Fraunhofer-LBF. Using this program, scientists can analyze vector or scalar values.
A similar program was used by students at UCSD to analyze the voxel data obtained when observing the solar winds. The image at left is a small
version of the visualization of the voxel data that depicts the solar wind patterns.
Other Applications of Virtual Reality Flight Simulator
Museums and Cultural Heritage Financial Data Training: Hubble Telescope On the Net: VR Resources
Eighteen professors from five departments decide to work together and submit a request for a virtual reality system. Suppose further that the administration actually believes that this is a wonderful idea and approves the proposal, provided that the virtual reality system is put to use in the classroom. The faculty eagerly agree to this condition, and to their amazement they acquire the funds to purchase an SGI Onyx 2 Reality Engine and 10 SGI Indigos.
The above scenario is not some introduction to a John Grisham suspense novel, but a real story at Clemson University. Recently Steve (D.E.) Stevenson from the Department of Computer Science at Clemson University came to the Geometry Center and talked about applications of Geometry with computers. Steve mentioned briefly how various departments had been using the virtual reality system they acquired, and showed specific examples of what they had done with them.
The departments using the system range from those which traditionally might use virtual reality, such as the Computer Science department, the Mechanical Engineering department and the Architecture department, to fields not generally associated with the technology such as the Biomedical Engineering department and the Performing Arts department. All these disciplines' projects use the technology in ways that create images and objects that otherwise would take a long time to construct, or not be feasible to construct at all.
In particular, software is currently under development for Mechanical Engineering students that extends CAD/CAE software to virtual reality. Instead of clicking keystrokes to try to alter perspective views, a user is able to wear a helmet and by moving their head around are able to view an object as if it were before them. Moreover one is able to look through different layers of an object to view how the device is operating internally. Although these are all things that CAD/CAE software allows, the virtual reality system gives a user a more natural way to view an object, which accordingly allows one to easier ask the question, "what if?"
Some of the other projects involving engineering are simulation-based design, multipurpose design optimization and visualization in High Performance Computing-Computer Formulated Design structures. Lastly one professor dreams of creating a simulation of the famous Tacoma Narrows bridge collapsing so that Civil and Mechanical Engineers can fully appreciate the consequences of their errors.
In the Biomedical Engineering department some of the projects mentioned are use of virtual reality for viewing of X-RAY's and MRI's, using stereolithography to make prototypes of joints, and even having students perform test surgery.
In the Computer Science department some of the projects range from creating a toolkit for non-computer science designers, rendering and 3-D lighting, viewing non-euclidean geometries, and modeling for resource management.
Projects in the Architecture department include creating a virtual reality model of campus, and a laboratory on building design.
People in the Performing Arts department use virtual reality for Stage Lighting and Stage Design Courses.
Of the above projects, two of the more interesting applications common to both Mechanical Engineering and Biomedical Engineering, involve stereolithography or 3D printing. One is able to design or input given data about an object and actually create a prototype made out of polymers of the object viewed in the virtual reality. One interesting example is that of an image of a Pelvis taken from an MRI, piped into the virtual reality software so that one is able to view it, and then a model of the bone is manufactured using the polymer machine. The following figure is a virtual reality image of this pelvis.
Similarly, a model of a "ship in a bottle" was created using CAD/CAE software viewed through the virtual reality software, and then made.
The virtual reality machines nicely compliment the polymer machine. One is able to thoroughly view an object before making a prototype, thus saving on the production costs of making a prototype.
The Computer Science department has also created some interesting programs. Two software programs are titled Steve's Room and Oliver's Room.
Steve's Room is a program which allows the user via the helmet to look around a room, turn on lights, and place objects by voice or mouse commands. Oliver's Room also is a high resolution room. In this room, one can see in high resolution, an Impressionist painting on the wall, a tiled floor, and a window with a view of mountains. The following picture is a view of Oliver's Room.
As with Steve's Room, the user is able via voice commands to move about the room. The next picture is an image of what one might see through the helmet after a request to move has been made.
The visual results from these projects are amazing, both in a practical sense and in a pure aesthetic sense. The images created are useful in understanding the structure of an object, as well as being suitable for framing. However, what is equally impressive is that various departments were able to get together and pool their resources so that this system could be acquired. By doing this, they have provided themselves, and more importantly, their students, an opportunity to use computer systems today that will no doubt be commonplace in the future.
Mass
Media:-Mass media has been a great advocate and perhaps a great hindrance to its development over the years. During the research “boom” of the late 1980s into the 1990s the news media's prognostication on the potential of VR — and potential overexposure in publishing the predictions of anyone who had one (whether or not that person had a true perspective on the technology and its limits) — built up the expectations of the technology so high as to be impossible to achieve under the technology then or any technology to date. Entertainment media reinforced these concepts with futuristic imagery many generations beyond contemporary capabilities.
Fiction books
Many science fiction books and movies have imagined characters being
"trapped in virtual reality". One of the first modern works to use this idea was Daniel F. Galouye's novel Simulacron-3, which was made into a German teleplay titled Welt am Draht ("World on a Wire") in 1973 and into a movie titled The Thirteenth Floor in 1999. Other science fiction books have promoted the idea of virtual reality as a partial, but not total, substitution for the misery of reality (in the sense that a pauper in the real world can be a prince in VR), or have touted it as a method for creating breathtaking virtual worlds in which one may escape from Earth's now toxic atmosphere. They are not aware of this, because their minds exist within a shared, idealized virtual world known as Dream Earth, where they grow up, live, and die, never knowing the world they live in is but a dream.
Stanislaw Lem wrote a short story in early 1960 called "dziwne skrzynie profesora Corcorana” in which he presented a scientist who devised a completely artificial virtual reality. Among the beings trapped inside his created virtual world, there is also a scientist, who also devised such machines creating another level of virtual world.
The Piers Anthony novel Killobyte follows the story of a paralyzed cop trapped in a virtual reality game by a hacker, whom he must stop to save a fellow trapped player with diabetes slowly succumbing to insulin shock. This novel toys with the idea of both the potential positive therapeutic uses, such as allowing the paralysed to experience the illusion of movement while stimulating unused muscles, as well as virtual realities' dangers.
An early short science fiction story — "The Veldt" — about an all too real
"virtual reality" was included in the 1951 book The Illustrated Man, by Ray Bradbury and may be the first fictional work to fully describe the concept.
Phillip K Dick's 1964 The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch includes Perky Pat 'layouts', small physical representations of the world exact in every detail complete with dolls. With the help of an interface in the form of a drug, people immerse, or 'translate', themselves totally into these worlds to escape the tedium of their lives as colonists on other planets of the solar system.
Vernor Vinge's True Names, published in 1981, imagines a virtual world which is probably the first to represent a metaverse as it was later to be characterised by such authors as William Gibson and Neal Stephenson. In True Names characters interact with each other in a complete world where they can have homes and work and are represented using avatars. This kind of virtual world was later to be realised as Second Life, which was launched in 2003.
The Otherland series of 4 novels by Tad Williams, published between 1996 and 2001 and set in the 2070s, show a world where the Internet has become accessible via virtual reality and has become so popular and commonplace that, with the help of surgical implants, people can connect directly into this future VR environment. The series follows the tale of a group of people who, while investigating a mysterious illness attacking children while in VR, find themselves trapped in a virtual reality system of fantastic detail and sophistication unlike any the world has ever imagined.
Other popular fictional works that use the concept of virtual reality include William Gibson's Neuromancer which defined the concept of cyberspace, Neal Stephenson's Snow Crash, in which he made extensive reference to the term avatar to describe one's representation in a virtual world, and Rudy Rucker's The Hacker and the Ants, in which programmer Jerzy Rugby uses VR for robot design and testing.
Another use of VR is in the teenage book "The Reality Bug" by D.J MacHale, where the inhabitants of a territory can have their own perfect virtual world, causing everyone to neglect the real world. To cause everyone to spend less time there, a virus is introduced that should make it slightly less than perfect.
However, it is so powerful it introduces their worst nightmares, and eventually physically breaks out of the computer until it is shut down.
Alexander Besher's Rim: A Novel of Virtual Reality is similar to Otherland, however it also shows the urban decay that obsession with VR has caused, and the devastating effects to the economy it causes after a major crash leaves millions of users in a coma and some dead.
Television
Perhaps the earliest example of virtual reality on television is a Doctor Who serial "The Deadly Assassin". This story, first broadcast in 1976, introduced a dream-like computer-generated reality known as the Matrix (no relation to the film — see below). The first major American television series to showcase virtual reality was Star Trek: The Next Generation. Several episodes featured a holodeck, a virtual reality facility that enabled its users to recreate and experience anything they wanted. One difference from current virtual reality technology, however, was that replicators, force fields, holograms, and transporters were used to actually recreate and place objects in the holodeck, rather than illusions of physical objects, as is done today.
In Japan and Hong Kong, the first anime series to use the idea of virtual reality was Video Warrior Laserion (1984).
An anime series known as Serial Experiments Lain included a virtual reality world known as "The Wired" that eventually co-existed with the real world.
Cult British BBC2 sci-fi series Red Dwarf featured a virtual reality game titled Better Than Life, featuring a plot where the main characters had spent many years connected to the game. This was elaborated on in the book, based on the series' episodes, of the same name. Virtual reality has also been featured in other Red Dwarf episodes including Back to Reality, where venom from the despair squid caused the characters to believe all their experiences on Red Dwarf had been part of a VR simulation. Other episodes that feature Virtual reality include Gunmen of the Apocalypse, Stoke Me a Clipper, Blue, Beyond a Joke, and Back in the Red.
Children's television show Are You Afraid Of The Dark? uses the concept of virtual reality as the premise of the episode "The Tale Of The Renegade Virus"
(1993).
Channel 4's Gamesmaster (1992 – 1998) also used a VR headset in its "tips and cheats" segment.
BBC 2's Cyberzone (1993) was the first true "virtual reality" game show. It was presented by Craig Charles.
FOX's VR.5 (1995) starring Lori Singer and David McCallum, used what appeared to be mistakes in technology as part of the show's on-going mystery.
In 2002, Series 4 of hit New Zealand teen sci-fi TV Series, The Tribe featured the arrival of a new tribe to the city, The Technos. They tried to gain power by introducing Virtual Reality to the city. The tribes would battle each other in the Virtual World in a "game" designed by the leader of The Techno's, Ram.
However, the effects of VR on the people turned nasty when they started to fight in the real world as well, after too much use made them unable to tell the difference between what was real and what was virtual.
In 2005, Brazilian's Globo TV features a show where VR helmets are used by the attending audience in a space simulation called Conquista de Titã, broadcasted for more than 20 million viewers weekly.
In the anime version of Yu-Gi-Oh!, one three-part episode sees the heroes entering a virtual world based on the game Duel Monsters, where the players must use their cards to work their way through a series of story-based challenges, including simulated monsters. Later, another anime-only arc forces the heroes to enter another virtual world, similar in concept but with a different set of rules. In both arcs, the bodies of the humans entering the virtual world are confined to special pods for the duration of their stay there.
The popular .hack multimedia franchise is based on a virtual reality MMORPG ironically dubbed "The World"
The French animated series Code Lyoko is based on the virtual world of Lyoko and the Internet. The virtual world is accessed by large scanners which use an atomic process which breaks down the atoms of the person inside, digitizes them and recreates an incarnation on Lyoko.
In 2010 Caprica a science fiction television series introduce a fully immersed virtual reality world that the main character ventures in.
Motion pictures
Steven Lisberger's 1982 movie TRON was the first mainstream Hollywood picture to explore the idea. One year later, it would be more fully expanded in the Natalie Wood film Brainstorm.David Cronenberg's film EXistenZ dealt with the danger of confusion between reality and virtual reality in computer games.
Cyberspace became something that most movies completely misunderstood, as seen in The Lawnmower Man. This idea was also used in Spy Kids 3-D: Game Over. Another movie that has a bizarre theme is Brainscan, where the point of the game is to be a virtual killer. A more artistic and philosophical perspective on the subject can be seen in Avalon. One of the non-Sci Fi movies that uses VR as a story driver is 1994's Disclosure, starring Michael Douglas and based on the Michael Crichton book of the same name. A VR headset is used as a navigating device for a prototype computer filing system. There is also a film from 1995 called "Virtuosity" with Denzel Washington and Russell Crowe that dealt with the creation of a serial killer, used to train law enforcement personnel, that escapes his virtual reality into the real world. Written by William Gibson himself, Johnny
Cyberspace became something that most movies completely misunderstood, as seen in The Lawnmower Man. This idea was also used in Spy Kids 3-D: Game Over. Another movie that has a bizarre theme is Brainscan, where the point of the game is to be a virtual killer. A more artistic and philosophical perspective on the subject can be seen in Avalon. One of the non-Sci Fi movies that uses VR as a story driver is 1994's Disclosure, starring Michael Douglas and based on the Michael Crichton book of the same name. A VR headset is used as a navigating device for a prototype computer filing system. There is also a film from 1995 called "Virtuosity" with Denzel Washington and Russell Crowe that dealt with the creation of a serial killer, used to train law enforcement personnel, that escapes his virtual reality into the real world. Written by William Gibson himself, Johnny