VR, or virtual reality, is technology that gives the illusion of being immersed into a computer generated, simulated environment. With VR, the user is placed inside an entire virtual experience. Instead of a screen, the user can experience a simulated reality all around them, most commonly achieved through the use of a head-mounted display (HMD). VR mainly incorporates auditory and visual sensory feedback, meaning what you see and what you hear, but it can also include haptic feedback, playing with your sense of touch.
The idea of virtual reality is one that takes some getting used to. The experience starts with donning an HMD and any other devices (such as gloves) and then entering the virtual environment. Now by entering the virtual environment, we don’t mean you are teleported elsewhere. Instead, your audio and visual senses are made to make you feel that you are in a separate reality. The headset covers your eyes and ears, and you have a 360 degree view of a computer simulated world. This means that any direction you look, you will see not the actual world around you, but the virtual world shown to you by the headset. The headset would also allow you control through different gestures, depending on the nature of the virtual program.
Present-day virtual reality can be said to have come into being with the display of an early prototype of the Oculus Rift, the most popular VR headset, at the 2012 E3 videogame trade show. Oculus was bought by Facebook in 2014 and in 2016, the first Oculus Rift came out. Some of the other big players in the VR game are Microsoft HoloLens, Sony Project Morpheus, Google Cardboard, and the Samsung GearVR.
With the growing number of tech companies going into VR development, a fully immersive VR experience doesn’t seem to be too far away for us.
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