Virtual Reality, a glimpse into the future. There has been wide speculation already as to how the future of the technology industry will be like and well; we don’t have to scratch our heads so much as to the new technology that seems to answer that question is currently available. Virtual Reality often abbreviated as VR is the most powerful innovation that a man has ever invented. Virtual Reality helps build a particular environment and all its surroundings and a person wearing the head gear feels a new experience around them.
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“Virtual Reality has the promises of making you feel present in another place, another time, or to have a perspective that you couldn’t have otherwise. This is perhaps why so many of the best VR experiences thus far have been documentary in nature, and why companies interested in telepresence like Facebook have invested in it so heavily.” Notes Recode, an online technology news website. The most known piece of hardware that makes it possible for one to explore and experience anything and anywhere is Facebook’s Oculus.
For years, VR has been a dream for many science fiction writers. However, just like any other Computer Generated application, VR relies on content creators. These are people who thoughtfully consider not just what goes on inside their VR experiences but how other people discover and access those experiences and write a program corresponding to it. VR takes you to the unknown world wear everything seems real but cannot be felt. When I decided to write about virtual reality, I didn’t focus on how much I understood it but rather how fascinating it was, building a world, writing computer codes to much the idea and setting a theme of an exact environment are just some of the mind boggling questions that surround virtual reality. I didn’t like technology when I was a kid because a lot of it was just portrayed in the movies that our parents said were not real and so there was no keen interest in technology but the older I grew, the more questions I started asking myself.
So what is VR and does it even matter?
Virtual Reality, also known as immersive multimedia or computer simulated reality is a computer technology that replicates an environment, real or imagined, and simulates a user’s physical presence and environment to allow for user interaction. Virtual Realities artificially create sensory experience which can include sight, touch, hearing and smell. Most of up-to-date Virtual Realities are displayed either on a computer monitor or with a VR headset which is also called head-mounted display and some simulations which include additional sensory information and focus on real sound through speakers or headphones targeted towards VR users.
VR matters because it can be used in medical, gaming, cinemas and military applications through advanced haptic systems which include tactile systems with tactile information generally known as ‘Force feedback’. Agreeably, VR is still in its creative infancy because its content creators are really just in the early stages of understanding how the medium works. Because of this, many critics decry it as a bubble waiting to burst.
However, the most obvious answer as to why VR matters is presence as quoted from the Recode and it makes it look as though the defining attribute of it is presence itself. VR too has a manipulative characteristic which enables cinemas to successfully manipulate time, architecture and place. What VR can accomplish like all mediums before it such as television, radio and the web, will be based on two things; the curious creativity of people making work for it and their optimistic passion for exploring what it can do that has never been done before.
The biggest for Virtual Reality for now is certainly video games. For many of us, affordable, viable VR is still a few years away but we can sit back and appreciate the efforts of others who want to make these experiences as broad as possible and the determination for VR to shape the future of technology solely relies on the content creators and perhaps we don’t have to wait too long because it certainly seems as though the future is now or can be seen from today.