Content area
Full Text
Abstract
Virtual Reality is a major asset and aspect of our future. It is the key to experiencing, feeling and touching the past, present and the future. It is the medium of creating our own world, our own customized reality. It could range from creating a video game to having a virtual stroll around the universe, from walking through our own dream house to experiencing a walk on an alien planet. With virtual reality, we can experience the most intimidating and gruelling situations by playing safe and with a learning perspective. In this review paper, we present our survey about virtual reality: the levels of virtual reality, the components used, the factors affecting the virtual environment, its origin, future and the challenges to overcome in order to obtain an impeccable virtual reality experience.
Keywords: Levels of Virtual Reality, Immersive Virtual Reality, Image Resolution, Frame Rate, Latency, HMD, CAVE, Virtusphere.
1. Introduction
Virtual Reality (VR) is a computer-simulated environment. It simulates a person's physical presence in the real and imaginary world. It is a fully-immersive, absorbing, interactive experience of an alternate reality in which the participant feels totally immersed in the environment by means of special human-computer interface equipment. Users can feel and touch simulated objects in that environment, giving the perception that these objects really do exist. They can interact with the virtual environment either through the use of standard input devices such as a keyboard and mouse, or through multimodal devices such as a wired glove, polhemus boom arm, and/or omni-directional treadmill. Thus, users interact with real-time virtual 3D objects in an intuitive & natural way, perceiving them as real and getting to understand, analyze and communicate [1].
2. Levels Of Virtual Reality
There are mainly three levels of Virtual Reality [2]:
2.1 Non-immersive
This level is normally experienced on a desktop computer, where the virtual environment is generated without any specific use of hardware or other processes. It can be used for training purposes. If the equipment is available, almost any scenario can be simulated, which eliminates any imminent dangers. Flight simulators can allow pilots to experience and prepare for situations that cannot be implemented or are hazardous and costly to be implemented in real world training. The illusion of being immersed...