My Vision of Virtual Reality
Virtual Reality – what exactly is it? As a Computer Graphics graduate student (and a technology enthusiast), this is a question that I have been put forth many times when I have met someone new. To be completely honest, I find myself asking the same questions whenever I see the big guns coming out with the latest cutting-edge technology in the field of Virtual Reality.
If we strictly follow the definition, Wikipedia quotes it as:
“Virtual reality is a simulated experience that can be similar to or completely different from the real world.”
Now, that is a good definition, but not enticing enough. It does not encapsulate all the features that come with when we speak of “Virtual Reality”. How is it similar? How can it be different? Does it even involve the real world? So many questions pop up, that require further discussion. And it is here, where we lack the precise knowledge and information that one needs to create the picture in their minds, of what virtual reality really is.
Let me focus on what I believe virtual reality is. Imagine a world, where the possibilities are endless. An alternate reality, that a person can create from the ground up according to their creative ideas, their rules or imagine being involved in someone else’s vision of “reality”. Virtual reality is something that has the potential to allow us to be creative to the point where the creative design may help us to develop a technical solution to a problem that we may or may not have known.
If we look at our society itself, we can see that many people are now considering virtual reality as a tool for solving existing problems in our society. There are applications that are being developed for training, for conducting simulations, for predicting outcomes, among many other scenarios, with the help of virtual reality environments. And this is what a society needs, to uplift itself from the current technological point it is at – this scenario, where instead of going out there, and doing things, we can carefully plan it out in a virtual environment, in a way that enables us to get more creative, and push the limits to their breaking point. If you ask me, I don’t even know the problems that would crop up, if we were to do something similar in real life.
And that is what my vision of Virtual Reality is. It is not a software development environment or a game development tool, rather a problem-solving add-on in our lives, where we can experiment to our heart’s content, and push the boundaries of experimentation, design, and engineering to a point that would not have been possible in traditional methods of problem-solving.
Us humans, we are a creative lot. If the risks involved with being curious are eliminated, imagine the possibilities that this incredible mind of ours could unlock.