Technology has advanced over the past years that you can create a virtual environment where people can interact in a simulation, and it seems real. Virtual reality is a computer technology that makes you feel as if you are somewhere else with scenes and objects that appear real.
The artificial environment has life-sized images and features according to the perspective of the user unless the user desires to get into a fantasy world. To get into the artificial environment user needs a special virtual reality set which includes a virtual reality headset which is the most important piece of a virtual reality kit, motion sensors, or a suit with sensors to get the full effect of virtual reality. The virtual headset is a helmet or a thick pair of goggles that go over your eyes attached is a small screen acting as a display and a pair of headphones for sound. To enhance the simulated experience, you can have hand controllers to translate your real-world gestures into the virtual world. The user feels immersed in their surroundings they can look, move around, and interact with virtual features in the artificial world.
Virtual reality systems generate realistic 3D images, videos, and sounds that simulate users’ presence in the virtual world and this is cast to the display on the headset. Using accessories like hand controllers helps track the movement of the user’s body and reflect the action on the lens on the helmet. Moving your head left, right, up, and down also reflect these motions inside VR by tracking the eye or head. The system is responsible for tracking user motions mostly the eyes and the head and reflects the change on display and immerses the user fully into the experience. The quality the user receives from the virtual environment is achieved through sound quality, graphics quality, and display resolution to make it appear as realistic as possible and improve the user experience.
Like smartphones, a VR device has an app store where you can get applications that majorly dwell on gaming and entertainment, but we also have other sectors like medicine, design, architecture, and education. For example, a user can enter a battlefield game and carry out actions as if they are immersed in a physical environment. In architecture you can walk around a virtual home design and in these simulations, you can be able to experience a building structure before it even exists reducing time spent on presentations and meetings for architects. In medicine, they are using VR to train medical students enabling them to experience surgeries from a surgeon’s perspective.
Currently, standard virtual reality systems contain the basic senses that are audio and visual while the most advanced should include all five senses to give the best VR system and enhance a high-quality user immersion experience. These are the best VR headset that uses computer pc, lenses, and advanced visual methodologies so they are expensive and High-end. For the cheaper VR headsets, use a mobile device that can be detached from the headset and require no advanced material and is referred to as cardboard VR headsets. The user only inserts the phone into a cardboard headset and then browses and explores the VR content.
As a technology, virtual reality has a lot of potential growth in the future and companies like Facebook recently renamed meta have already started investing to develop a virtual world called metaverse where users can interact in a 3D universe to socialize, work, game, and meet in virtual spaces. Overall VR is not fully adapted to our environment but in the coming years, we expect it will lead to revolutionary changes in the world in many sectors.
