Virtual Reality: Virtual and Synthetic Environments — Technologies and Applications

摘要

With most new and exciting technologies, there is often an early tendency for the pioneers and “evangelists” to become preoccupied with novel hardware and software and divorced from the requirements of commercial applications and user needs. Typically the result is a painfully slow and often costly uptake process on the part of industry and commerce. “Technology push” outweighs both “market pull” and sensible implementation based on sound ergonomics principles. So it was in the past with speech recognition, robotics, artificial intelligence and neural networks. So it was with Virtual Reality (VR). That is, until quite recently. Since 1997, and after an incubation period lasting some 6-7 years, VR has experienced something of a massive revival. A revival that has taken the form of a number of important developments that have helped VR to become an accessible, usable and justifiable technology for many industrial, commercial, educational and public sectors.