A New Reality: Virtual Reality

The Future is Here!

Have you ever wondered what makes VR work? How can a headset make you feel like you’re really flying around a city, when you’re really just wandering around your living room? There’s more to this technology than just replacing what we can see with something more amazing.

Humans have been investigating their environments for years: testing artificial structures, creating experimentation labs, and even launching satellites to observe the surface of our entire globe. However, not everyone gets to build artificial structures that matter, have the equipment to explore a lab, or examine the pieces that makeup satellites.

Most people learn today by reading through textbooks, watching videos, or listening to lectures, but these methods were never the best way to engage people in learning and truly test around concepts. There is a limited amount of understanding people gain from these sources of knowledge within a period of time, so it’s time to step it up a notch!

Virtual Reality (VR)

Many of us assume that virtual reality has been a marketing buzzword to describe immersive experiences with video games or TV shows selectively, as they can make you adapt to a whole new world of a computer-generated reality. So sure, realistic video games and entertainment are nice, but this is only tip of the iceberg.

Virtual reality is a three-dimensional, computer-generated environment that can be interacted with by a person. This computer-generated technology is harnessed to make this virtual reality look 100% believable to the human eye since VR changes to match how your senses are stimulated. Within this virtual world, one is able to manipulate objects or perform certain actions as if they were actually there. With the ever-growing use of VR, we’ve now been able to see it used in SO many different industries! So, to see where this new craze with simulated environments began, let’s take a step back and learn how virtual reality actually works. (source)

You can often think of virtual reality as being a gateway to a whole new world, where you can respond to what you see and what you see can respond back to you.

How VR Actually Works — Technical Stuff

VR technology is growing increasingly impressive as we explore various ways to make the virtual world feel more like the real world. As developments continue, headsets are becoming sleeker and more mobile, with fewer wires and more high-definition pixels. Haptic sensors and tracking gloves are replacing clunky control systems, while machine learning and AI advancements change the way that VR technology tracks our interactions.

From a technical perspective, VR is a simple concept, made of wires, screens, and computer systems all connected together. A wider review reveals an evolving environment that’s growing increasingly more complex and immersive. (source)

The Basics — Headsets

VR headsets are essentially just machines designed to replace our surroundings with something created in software.

VR headsets range from the simplest ones being made out of cardboard and a few lenses all the way up to being sensor filled LCD screen glasses packed with technology. There’s another realm of VR headsets too, that’s standalone VR. The two primary standalone VR headsets are the Oculus Go and the Daydream headset. Standalone VR, in short, simply means that you can put on the headset and be good to go. You don’t need another device like your smartphone or computer to run the show.

VR headsets are called head mounted displays, which means that the screen is mounted to your face. Wherever you move your head, the screen follows you. Headsets also have lenses placed between your eyes and the screen, which are used to focus and reshape the picture for each eye. They create a stereoscopic 3D image by angling the two 2D images. This is because the lenses mimic how each of our two eyes see the world very slightly differently.

For certain VR headsets like the HTC Vive and the Oculus Rift, a console or computer is needed for the headsets to work. Video is sent from the console or the computer to the VR headset. For other headsets like the Google Daydream and the Samsung Gear VR, a smartphone has to be slotted into the headset, and the video plays from the phone. (source)

Head Tracking

Head motion tracking, the process where the recording of your head’s movement is applied to make changes to the components of images displayed in the headset, is what allows this to work in VR. Headsets use a system called six degrees of freedom (6DoF), which looks at your head’s position in terms of the X, Y, and Z axis to measure head movements.

There are a couple of different components use in a head-tracking system, including a gyroscope, accelerometer, and magnetometer.

In order for head-tracking to be effective, low latency is needed. Latency is the time from when the user moves their head or moves an input device to the time when that change appears on the display. In order for the user to feel comfortable, the lag cannot be greater than 30 milliseconds.

3D audio is something that is used by developers to increase the sense of immersion. This gives the user the allusion that the sound is coming from behind them, next to them, in front of them, or in the distance. (source)

Motion Tracking

VR headsets like the Oculus Rift and the HTC Vive have a set of wireless controllers that are used to make you feel like you are controlling what is happening in your VR simulation. There are certain buttons on the controller as well as a lot of sensors to detect gestures such as pointing and waving. Different input methods include voice controls, smart gloves, and even treadmills, which allow you to simulate walking around in a VR environment.

How VR is Being Used Right Now

VR has the potential to disrupt every single industry. It will allow us to live in a way we have never thought of before. Aside from gaming, VR is being used in many different sectors today. Let’s look at a few right now.

Education

Its been scientifically proven that you retain a lot more information when you actually take action on that knowledge. When you take that into account, the traditional way of learning just doesn’t make sense.

Would you rather read about planets, stars, and constellations from a 500 page textbook (seriously estimating that number) or walk through the galaxy yourself? I’m just gonna take a wild guess — and say you’d choose the second option. If I’m correct, listen up!

Imagine if you could travel to France to look at the Eiffel Tower with your classmates on a class trip. Or actually travel through a blood vessel and seeing it in action instead of memorizing multiple diagrams of the circulatory system. Sounds like an incredible learning experience, something straight out of the magic school bus— if only it wasn’t just “imagine.”

WELLLL lucky for us and thanks to virtual reality, this no longer has to be our imaginations. Virtual reality allows you to go into a completely different reality through the stimulation of a real interactive environment. This emerging technology is capable of changing the education system completely. It allows students to be curious, creative and most importantly it’s interactive. At the end of the day, wouldn’t it be way cooler to learn about Mars ON Mars?!

Healthcare

Virtual reality is used in many areas of healthcare, in a variety of applications. These include medical training, for both doctors in training and students, patient treatment, medical marketing, educating people about a disease or medical condition or process and even therapy! Check out my article on VR mental health and therapy treatments HERE.

I could write a whole separate article on just this sector alone, but I’ll keep it brief for your sake!

One of the main uses of VR is medical training. Allowing medical students to practice surgeries and other procedures, which allows them to make mistakes without actually harming a real human being. This helps students actually get “hands on” experience before going out into the real world.

A study was done by Duke University which used VR and brain computer interfaces (BCIs) to help treat paraplegic patients. This 12-month study was conducted with 8 patients showed that VR can help aid in restoring ability with patients who suffer from a chronic spinal cord injury. They used a brain machine interface and a VR headset to simulate neurological functions that allowed them to move their lower limbs. At the end of the study, 100% of the patients experienced some level of recovery in terms of increased muscle control and sensation in their legs. (source)

Architecture

Since VR is in three dimensions, architects can use it to design buildings instead of hand-drawn diagrams and computer-generated images. VR is much more cost effective and efficient than traditional methods of planning for construction. Designers can also test out environments in VR before actually physically building them.

Iris VR is the leading immersive design company for architecture, construction, and engineering. Iris VR allows you to see your 3D files and collaborate with your colleagues in VR. It allows you to see your designs to scale, and visualize what they will look like before you actually start building them in real life. (source)

Future of VR

Over the next few years, in VR, as in all fields of technology, we’re going to see things that make what is cutting-edge today look like Space Invaders. The effects of this transformation will be far broader, touching on our work, education, and social lives.

Today’s most popular VR applications involve taking total control of a user’s senses (sight and hearing, particularly) to create a totally immersive experience that places the user in a fully virtual environment that feels pretty realistic. Climb up something high and look down, and you’re likely to get a sense of vertigo. If you see an object moving quickly towards your head, you’ll feel an urge to duck out of the way.

Very soon, VR creators will extend this sensory hijacking to our other faculties — for example, touch and smell — in order to deepen that sense of immersion. At the same time, the devices we use to visit these virtual worlds will become cheaper and lighter, removing the friction that can currently be a barrier. We'll have faster, lighter, more affordable VR technology. And advances in smartphone technology (such as better cameras and processors) will mean we can enjoy slicker AR and VR experiences on our phones. And with 5G wireless networks, we'll be able to enjoy them wherever we are in the world.

The sky truly is the limit.

TL;DR

• Many of us assume that virtual reality has been a marketing buzzword to describe immersive experiences with video games or TV shows selectively, but truth is VR has the potential to disrupt every single industry!
• Virtual reality is a three-dimensional, computer-generated environment that can be interacted with by a person. This computer-generated technology is harnessed to make this virtual reality look 100% believable to the human eye since VR changes to match how your senses are stimulated.
• VR headsets are essentially just machines designed to replace our surroundings with something created in software.
• Head motion tracking, the process where the recording of your head’s movement is applied to make changes to the components of images displayed in the headset, is what allows this to work in VR.
• Motion Tracking, the process of digitizing your movements for use in computer software, is a key component of VR systems. Without VR motion tracking systems, you would find yourself restricted in the virtual world, unable to look around, move, and explore.
• VR can disrupt industries like the education system, healthcare, business, architecture, military training, and so many more.
• Over the next few years, in VR, as in all fields of technology, we’re going to see things that make what is cutting-edge today look like Space Invaders. The effects of this transformation will be far broader, touching on our work, education, and social lives.

Conclusion

As you can see, there really is no limit to this emerging technology, as the future of VR applications will disrupt the fields of medicine, education and even how we live our every day lives. We must learn how to co exist with this technology, as it can provide answers to questions we’ve been asking for years, simply by transposing us to a different dimension or adding virtual elements to our already existing environment.

The opportunities in these fields are endless and we can now physically be in experiences rather than watching them from the sidelines.

Hi, name is Victoria! A 15 year old science and technology enthusiast! Follow along on my path to becoming a unicorn person [one that impacts billions🦄.] Don’t hesitate to give feedback, suggestions and comments. If you enjoyed this article, clap it and feel free to connect with me on LinkedIn. Thank you so much for reading, until next time!!