Emerging Trend — Virtual Reality
Our basic senses as human beings include touch, smell, taste, sight, and hearing, and everything we perceive about this world comes from these senses. In other words, our entire experience of reality is a combination of sensory information and human brains’ sense-making mechanisms. Virtual Reality (VR), then, entails presenting our senses with a computer-generated virtual environment that we can explore in some fashion. The earliest Virtual Reality device can be traced back in the 1960s, but in the 21st century, Palmer Luckey created the first prototype of a VE headset in 2010 (The Guardian, November 10th, 2016). Since then, several other companies started to develop VR devices such as Oculus Rift, Sony’s PlayStation VR, Samsung’s Gear VR, HTC Vive, and Google’s Tilt Brush.
The most essential piece of VR kit is the headset, which connects to a computer and runs application and games. Along with the headset, a high-quality pair of headphone is necessary in order to create a three-dimensional, computer-generated environment that can be explored and interacted with (The Guardian, November 10th, 2016). Google recently releases its new open-source Tilt Brush toolkit that can help artists bring their 3D sketches to life as games, music videos and stories (ZD Net, January 20th, 2017). Meanwhile, with the Oculus Rift and HTC Vive, these devices are now supporting 360-degree videos on YouTube (Engadget, January 20th, 2017). In terms of VR gaming, Sony’s PlayStation VR focuses more on running games with higher screen resolutions and frame rates.
Although the potential entertainment value for VR device is clear (e.g. films, videos, and video games), VR still has many other applications in various fields such as medical, sports, architecture, and education.
