VR technologies

In our age of information technology, it is impossible to imagine a person without a phone, computer or other gadget that would serve as a portal for us to the World Wide Web.

The Internet has become a parallel universe in which almost everyone, young and old, lives. Once upon a time, the creation of the worldwide network was considered a breakthrough, an unprecedented progress of human thought in the field of technology, but now we have stepped even further.

And in this article, I invite you to get acquainted with virtual reality, the technologies of our present and future.

What is virtual reality?

This term means a virtual world created with the help of various technical means, transmitted to a person through a system of analyzers in our body, that is, with the help of hearing, sight, touch and even smell.

To create virtual reality, for a long time, studies have been carried out on the behavior of various objects of our reality under various conditions, and under various influences on these objects.

This information was carefully selected and analyzed, and then became part of the virtual world with the output to the real world through certain technologies.

What kind of technologies are used to immerse a person in virtual reality?

It is worth starting with our visual analyzer, or with image output technologies. There are several of them:

1. Virtual reality helmet or HMD-display.

Despite the fact that it is called a virtual reality helmet, this device still resembles glasses with systems for influencing other analyzers of our body.

The principle of operation of this equipment is simple. The helmet consists of one or more displays, a lens system for adjusting the geometry of the image so that the house, for example, is not smaller than a person, and a tracking system - mechanisms that report on the position of the helmet in space, which just helps to feel in virtual reality like in the real world.

The tracking system resembles the work of a gyroscope or an accelerometer, which allow you to determine the position of the body controlled by it in space, relative to the well-known main coordinate axes.

2. MotionParallax 3D displays

This is another class of virtual reality devices that allows a person to be in a virtual world by displaying a virtual reality object in a certain projection in volume and at the angle at which a person is looking at this object at a given time.

These devices can be either in the form of a display, similar to the TV in our apartment, or in the form of specially equipped rooms in which sensors are installed that track the position of a person in this room, and, depending on this, change the position of virtual reality objects.

Features of these devices is that this system uses such a volume perception mechanism as motion parallax. In simple terms, the system calculates your coordinates at a given point in time and reproduces the image at such an angle and in such volumes that they would be in our real world when you were at a certain distance from them (which the system calculated) and watched to objects at a certain angle (which the system calculated).

I will give some examples of virtual reality devices:

• Amazon Fire Phone.

• NettleBox virtual reality system.

• Virtual room (CAVE) EON ICube.

All these and some other devices help a person to find himself in a completely different world, to feel it as a whole: to see, hear, feel.

Each system of this kind is also equipped with additional devices, such as a multi-channel speaker system that allows you to reproduce the localization of the sound source, virtual reality gloves that allow you to feel a tactile response when interacting with virtual reality objects, and also to most accurately recreate the user's contact with environment, user interfaces are used that most realistically correspond to the simulated ones: a computer steering wheel with pedals, device control handles, a target designator in the form of a pistol, etc.

They help connect all the other analyzers of our body, because virtual reality is not only an opportunity for a person to travel around the world without leaving the room, but also a great chance to visit the unknown worlds of your favorite computer games and films.

I would like to note that there is another class of devices that belong to virtual reality technologies, but still developers are still thinking about the correctness of their classification, and put this device between virtual reality and augmented reality, which we will talk about in the next article .

So number three is the virtual retinal monitor.

Sounds menacing perhaps, but this is an amazing technology that reproduces the image directly on the retina of the eye, which allows you to see the object of virtual / augmented reality in all colors.

This class of devices cannot be called virtual reality just because the projected object is still in our reality, although it is not real. Only under certain conditions, a good darkening of the space, you can use these devices to immerse yourself in the world of virtual reality.

Technologies do not stand still, they are developing and not to the detriment of all mankind, as they wanted to show us in the movie "Terminator". Approaching the emerging development prospects wisely, our life will indeed be enriched with new impressions and opportunities.