More Than Just Gaming Addiction

"Virtual reality is a medium, a means by which humans can share ideas and experiences." - Alan B. Craig, Developing Virtual Reality Applications

Since this week's topic is just about anything, I thought I could elaborate on Virtual reality, something my group did for our project.

I shall first begin with its definition, as quoted from dictionary.com: A realistic simulation of an environment, including three-dimensional graphics, by a computer system using interactive hardware and software.

In recent years, virtual reality is gaining much more attention, with newspaper reports of it causing suicides amongst other disastrous impacts. However, virtual reality surfaced as early as the 1960s, with the introduction of the first multi-sensory simulator called Sensorama.

In 1982, the Visually Coupled Airborne Systems Simulator was introduced. It was an advanced flight simulator with an out-the-window view. As we can see, even in its early stages of development, virtual reality was not just targeting at the gaming aspect.

The term Virtual Reality was coined by Jaron Lanier, the father of virtual reality technology. According to Lanier, it was his attempt at distunguishing "between traditional computer simulations and the shared, digital worlds he was trying to create" ("Interview: Jaron Lanier", 1992). But Lanier feels that the term "has been bastardized and hyped up and turned into a whole subcultural craziness".

His view may not entirely be wrong.

After all, we see reports splashed across newspapers about how virtual reality has resulted in murder cases, and even negligence in childcare, leading to a baby's death. "A 22-year-old even burgeoned his mother to death for nagging at him for spending time playing Internet games." (Lim et al., 2011)

However, all these occurred due to long hours of play, resulting in addiction in virtual reality games.

We have to understand that even with these negative impacts, virtual reality has in fact, many other applications in various fields such as medicine, politics, and the military.

But because my group has already touched on the above few categories, I would like to zero in on architecture.

Archiform 3D, an Animation and Rendering studio specializing in Architectural and Landscape scenes, has been creating virtual reality renderings since the early 1990s. The company believes that "virtual reality renderings, visualisation and animations bring new designs to virtual 3D life, allowing you to see everything in its glory as though it was already built" (Archiform3D, 2011). Below are a few pictures from them.

(Photos courtesy of Archiform3D)

The photos show just how real the buildings are, don't they?

Furthermore, I've just learnt from the very same site that there are more than just a few types of virtual reality used in architecture. There's 3D virtual reality, 3D rendered virtual reality, photographic virtual reality, 3D animated virtual reality, real time virtual reality, and holographic reality. (Archiform3D, 2011)

More information can be found at Archiform3D.

Archiform 3D also thinks that "nothing exists in reality to begin with so our artists use any information that they can gather to create a virtual model, one that exists inside a computer" (Archiform3D, 2011).

I quite like this idea because it means people can do almost anything they dream of, which is limited in every sense such as physics. Also, we're often encouraged to think out of the box aren't we? This virtual reality in architecture certainly allows us to work our creativity into reality, albeit in just the virtual world.

Virtual reality indeed, is not just limited to the field of gaming and murder cases, as my shallow brain used to think so. I believe there are more areas that my group hasn't researched on. But virtual reality has proven itself to be a great help in areas such as architecture, medicine, politics and military, just to name a few.