Virtual Reality as been around for years. Due to many factors, it took some time and efforts to make it what it is today. Virtual reality is still a much hyped term that brings people to speculate on the endless virtues of this emerging technology. As time passes, we are seeing the real applications coming into life. Here, we will try to list the current major application fields that show the most encouraging growth tendencies.
Architecture
One of the most obvious application of Virtual Reality was the so familiar architectural walkthrough.
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Architecture had this particularity to be very closely compatible with what is a basic Virtual Reality system. That is, to let the user explore a 3D scene in real time, showing exactly what this user wanted to see, on demand, without having previously computed it.
The real-time aspect of such systems revealed to be very appreciated by the users as it enabled them to show, in much more details and realism, their designs to others.
The communication power of these kinds of tools is a major point of interest that will surely keep this application, one of the most used and successful one of Virtual Reality.
The illustrations on top and on the left show typical scenes of architecture virtual reality systems.
Please take note that some of these images are not currently achievable in full real time with current technologies. Nevertheless, they closely represent where we are aiming at in the near future for these kinds of applications.
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As computing power, and especially 3D graphics rendering performances increases, we will see more and more of these kinds of level of visual details with a high number of polygons, in real time.
The next scene below clearly shows the power of communication that such systems have. Now imagine that you could move around, without any restrictions in the direction you choose. The creator of the VR system has the choice to model object collisions or let the user walk through walls and objects.
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This is an other interesting point about VR systems. They let the user go beyond the limits of physics as we know them. With a Virtual Reality system, you have the choice to closely model reality or to permit things that would be impossible to do in real life conditions. This may offer great advantages over more conventional methods of communicating ideas. This is particularly true for architectural applications where you may want to freely go from one point of view to an other in the room.
Visualization
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Visualization application resemble the well-known architectural walk through on many aspects. In fact, we could probably view architectural walk through as a type of the more general case, visualization applications.
Virtual reality really shows its strength for visualizing complex data when it has a notion of volume. VR visualization is also very powerful in applications involving abstract data that are multi-dimensional.
Entertainment
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An other major use of Virtual Reality environments is found in the entertainment market. This is in fact the biggest application in terms of financial profitability. Many companies are producing games that uses Virtual Reality principles. The audience for such games is enormous and explains why this application is so important.
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The gamming industry has a big impact on the Virtual Reality field. It generates the necessary momentum in the industry to accelerate the development of a great variety of VR hardware such as the graphic accelerator cards. If we go back about 10 years in time, it was difficult to find a graphic accelerator card having sufficient computing power to enable the creation of real time VR applications. These boards were costing over thousands of dollars and could barely render 100 000 polygon per second at medium resolution. Other hardware devices such as VR Gloves and Head Mounted Displays (HMDs) helmet were partially influenced by the entertainment industry as well. All in all, we can safely say that the Virtual Reality entertainment application is on of those which is playing an important role in defining where the VR industry is going to.
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In the recent years, a new kind of companies emerged. They are called Location Based Entertainment Centers (LBE). They specifically focus on bringing the Virtual Reality concepts to the masses in the form of simulation gears of all sorts. A few examples are shown above and on the right. These platforms enable to user to feel more deeply immersed in a totally new experience.
LBE’s brings the high end simulations systems to the grasp of casual users. Making such business profitable isn’t necessarily an easy task. This is vastly due to the fact that the required hardware is quite expensive and require a long period of use to finance itself. There exists a few examples of LBE centers that are successful. As technology evolves and get cheaper, we will certainly see more and more of these entertainment centers appear.
Manufacturing
In manufacturing applications, we see all levels of 3D computer assisted design systems (CAD) up to the full blown Virtual Reality system, using high-end head mounted displays and VR gloves.
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This is to say that 3D computer graphics has been in use for years in that field, but it wasn’t until recently that the conventional desktop CAD system shifted toward more advanced techniques such as virtual prototyping of mechanical devices and many more.
Nowadays, the use of virtual reality in the manufacturing area includes simulating airflow and aerodynamic performances of a car frame. Other uses of VR includes ergonomic studies such as shown in the figure above. The designers are able to test the placement of various components inside the car so that the seated driver can easily access and manipulate all the controls around him. This kind of virtual prototyping is a very efficient and cost effective method to perform early tests and fine tune manufacturing details before any physical prototype is actually required.
Augmented Reality
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This is an application that has an enormous potential in term of bringing a real added value to current commercial problems. An AR system, contrary to a VR system, is made to mix both the real and the virtual scene around the user. The figure on the right illustrate this very well. Here, a technician is wearing a see-through HMD so that he can see his surroundings while being able to see added 2D and 3D visual and textual information in an overlay fashion. He can thus proceed with a maintenance task while consulting technical blue prints, or any other relevant document. With the advent of wireless computing, this system can be made fully portable so that the employee can move around the factory while using the AR system.
Art
Virtual reality has also found many applications in arts. From generating music using VR pointing devices to virtual reality painting applications in CAVE systems. Althought it is hard to tell if such applications will ever emerge as sucessful artistic creation tools, virtual reality favor the artistic creation process as it is a technology that closely interface to the human senses.
Education & Training
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Flight simulation is probably one of the oldest virtual reality application. Flight simulators actually existed long before people were talking of “virtual reality”. In some way, flight simulators probably partially paved the way to the birth of virtual reality itself. They share a lot of particularities with current virtual reality systems such as high immersion and real-time control by the user.
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Medical
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Virtual Communities & Distributed VR
Ultimately, virtual reality will evolve in a fully integrated and networked communication medium that allows people to cooperatively work through a virtual world. Collaborative VR already shows great promises in many fields such as in medecine. We are not too far away from the day where a surgeon located in one city, even one country, will opperate a patient located in an other part of the world. The NASA already used that principle to control its Mars exploratory probes. The specific applications are only limited by our imagination.
In conclusion
One aspect that is predominant in each of these application is the fact that they all try to enhance a system that is already successful in its own area of expertise. The use of Virtual Reality is successful when it brings something new, when it adds value to the whole experience while maintaining the viability and usefulness of a product. These are all, in fact, general recommendations that are valid for VR systems as well as any other type of systems.
For a VR application to be successful, it must add content to the information presented to the user. Too often, we see poor Virtual Reality application that were designed only to visually impress the user with colorful images and animations. Most of the time, these systems have a short life because they were not really thought to facilitate resolving a particularly difficult task, but more to showcase a “cool” technology.
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