Task 3:Summary(Enhance Virtual Reality)

       Virtual reality is an illusory environment which attempts to give the brain a realistic set of sensations. True virtual reality creates an illusion of actually being there. It has been shown that people immersed in a virtual world and also respond realistically in interactions with life-sized virtual characters. It has been proved that virtual reality can be used in treating several kinds of disorders. Virtual reality also offers advantages for various sorts of research, education, and training. Virtual reality enables people to advance video conferencing with other people who located in the other parts of the world and carry out tasks together. A formidable engineering challenge is to allow dispersed people to seamlessly see, hear, and touch each other, even share real objects and equipment. The resolution of the video display and the field of view must be improved to maintain the illusion of a real scene. Reproducing sensations of sound, touch, and motion are very important to serious simulation. It is impossible to reproduce the fine-grained details precisely. There is another formidable challenge to place realistic “virtual people” in the scene to interact with the user. Identifying the level of detail for a user to accept the illusion is one of the challenges of virtual reality research. The accurate reproduction of sound and touch is more important than visually precise detail. Touch is an difficult challenge for engineers. For some uses, gloves containing sensors can record the movements of a user’s hand and provide tactile feedback, but somewhat crudely. It is still in the beginning stages to solve such problems. There is one possible approach would make use of electrorheological fluids, which alter their thickness when exposed to electric fields of different strengths. It may not be virtual reality per se, but a related concept also seems to be growing in cyberspace.

References
National Academy of Engineering (NAE). (2008). Enhance virtual reality. (n.d.). Retrieved October 2, 2008, from http://www.engineeringchallenges.org/cms/8996/9140.aspx