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VIRTUAL REALITY has caught people's imaginations and inspired fantasies far out of proportion to what the technology can actually deliver, now (1995) or in the foreseeable future.
Virtual reality technology promises to immerse you in an exotic computer-generated world. You put on the helmet-like headset, slip on the data glove, perhaps get on a treadmill, and connect to a computer. (Ultimately you will wear an entire body suit.) Pick your reality-generating software -the planet Venus, perhaps, or a Wild West scenario with bad guys to shoot. As you move, the environment alters to create the illusion that you are moving around within it. Other people can also enter the environment, you can "interact."
To the virtual reality user, the experience is one of being "in" the new environment. To the outside observer, there is only the strange spectacle of a person wearing a bulky helmet waving a gloved hand around and moving in weird, unpredictable ways.
I have not yet tried "VR" technology myself, although I am told that the graphics are rudimentary and the illusion is partial. There is a slight time delay between your movement and the corresponding movement of the environment. The headmounted display is bulky and heavy. And after a while, some users start to feel queasy and ill.
In fact, despite glossy depictions of VR in movies like "Lawnmower Man" and "Disclosure," researchers are having difficulty reproducing realistic sights, sounds, and touches. The small TV sets in the eyepieces of the helmets don't have the same power to resolve details as the human eye, so high resolution images still look like they are composed of little dots ("pixellated"). Realistic sounds are also proving difficult to simulate, despite the invention of a machine called the "Convolvotron" to generate sounds that will vary with the movement of the subject. And it has proven surprisingly complex to simulate the touch...