What is Virtual Reality ?

The definition of Virtual Reality comes, normally, from the definitions for both ‘Virtual’ and ‘Reality’. The meaning of term virtual is close or near and Reality is what human experience in day to day life. If we club both the term, virtual + reality, the definition will be “near-reality”.

We know the world through our most obvious senses and perception. Our experience of reality is basically a combination of sensory information and our brains sense-making mechanism for that information. That means if something imaginary is presented to our senses, our perception of reality would also change in response to it. Our senses will be presented with a version of reality that really doesn’t exist, but from our perspective, it would be real. Technically, we referred to it as Virtual Reality. 

So technically speaking, the Virtual reality is an artificial environment that is created with the help of computers programmes and presented to the user in such a way that the user suspends belief and accepts it as a real environment. On a computer, virtual reality is primarily experienced through two of the five senses: sight and sound.

Virtual Reality makes you think you are actually living inside a completely believable virtual world (one in which you are partly or fully immersed). It is two-way interactive: as you respond to what you see, what you see responds to you: if you turn your head around, what you see or hear in VR changes to match your new perspective. 

Let’s try to understand this point by some examples. When you listen to any instrumental or classical music with your eyes closed and start dreaming about things, isn’t then an example of virtual reality? An experience of a world that doesn’t really exists? What about losing yourself in the book or a movie? Well, they are not… Essentially Virtual Reality is :

1. Believable – You really need to feel like you are in your virtual world and to keep believing that, or the illusion of virtual reality will disappear.
2. Interactive – As you move around, the VR world needs to move with you. You can watch a 3D movie and be transported up to the moon or down to the seabed – but it’s not interactive in any sense.
3. Computer Generated – Only powerful machines with realistic 3D computer graphics are fast enough to make believable, interactive, alternative worlds that change in real-time as we move around them.
4. Explorable: A VR world needs to be big and detailed enough for you to explore. Painting or a book can describe a vast and complex virtual world but you can only explore it in a linear way, exactly as the author or painter describes it.
5. Immersive: VR engages both your body and mind to make you believe and interactive. A book on world war can give us glimpses of conflict, but they can never fully convey the sight, sound, smell, and feel of battle. A flight simulator game on your home PC makes you lost in a very realistic, interactive experience for hours (the landscape will constantly change as your plane flies through it), but it's not like using a real flight simulator (where you sit in a hydraulically operated mockup of a real cockpit and feel actual forces as it tips and tilts), and even less like flying a plane.

Things like interactive games and computer simulations would certainly meet parts of the definition. There is more than one approach to building virtual worlds and more than one flavor of Virtual reality.

Virtual Reality has always suffered from the perception that it’s a little more than a dream escape from reality, however, that’s not true. It’s a hard-edged practical technology that's been routinely used by scientists, doctors, dentists, engineers, architects, archaeologists, and the military for about the last 30 years.

This technology is becoming cheaper and more widespread. We can expect to see many more innovative uses for the technology in the future and perhaps a fundamental way in which we communicate and work thanks to the possibilities of virtual reality.

Dear Readers, Thanks for reading our post. Kindly comment below the post and do share your response.