What is Virtual Reality?
Unless you’re on the Enterprise’s Holodeck or trapped inside the Matrix with Keanu Reeves, what you’re experiencing right now as you read these words is “reality.” “Real” reality to be specific (and redundant). Virtual reality, as the name suggests, is a computer simulation. A fake location with fake objects and beings. In a virtual reality you can see, hear, touch and smell what’s in front of you even though it doesn’t physically exist.
Virtual Reality Devices Today
- The Oculus Rift This tech wonder looks like some combination between scuba goggles and a sleep mask. It allows users to “step into” a game or video. You’re present with and immersed in what you’re seeing and hearing. You can interact with the images using a controller like the Xbox One wireless gamepad, the Oculus Touch tracking controllers, or your real movements can be translated digitally through a sensor in front of you.
- The Microsoft HoloLens Microsoft’s virtual reality device will be available to the public in 2016. This “holographic computer” merges your digital world (including apps like your calendar, weather, to do list, etc.) with your real world. With it you can see holographic images and put them anywhere you want. As Microsoft’s official video illustrates, you can watch sports on your kitchen wall, hang your grocery list on your refrigerator, and turn your living room into a giant Minecraft game.
Virtual Reality in the Future
- Social VR Combining social media and virtual reality, social VR will enable people to not just be on the same website, but sitting together in a lifelike living room!
- Design Right now designers can create 3D scale models of objects. Imagine designing a house not from the outside looking in, but by creating a virtual reality rendition of it that you can simply stroll through, editing as you go!
- Price As it is with most technologies, the cost of virtual reality devices is slowly going down. In 5 – 10 years a VR headset could be as common in the home as cell phones are today.Virtual reality is the next step. With devices like the Oculus Rift and the Microsoft HoloLens we can create virtually what we can’t in reality! Unfortunately an actual Holodeck is still far off in the future, but at this rate we might still see one in our lifetimes!
