Essay: The Oculus Rift – Virtual Reality

The Oculus Rift is one of the first VR systems that will produce a realistic sense of immersion at an affordable price(Thomas Cornall,2014) The Oculus Rift gaming chair is a peripheral device that enhances the immersion of the Oculus Rift beyond what it is already capable of by providing syntactic feedback to the user(Yenumula V. Reddy, 2014) and defined on it ( Ishan Goradia and other ,2014) Virtual reality (VR) is a technology used for interaction with a computer generated environment. It is a simulated version of the real environment and can be experienced in three dimensions. Screens are used to display this visual experience. And the above can be argued that the oculus rift technology is” Virtual reality simulation”. The oculus rift technology Is one of the emerging technologies in 2014 . The idea of VR has been around for decades, but it has only recently been considered possible and even more recently, inevitable. In general terms, virtual reality fully immerses the user in a three-dimensional, computer-generated world and, depending on the system used, the amount of immersion in the virtual world can be anywhere from barely being able to affect virtual objects to feeling every part of the virtual world. The goal of anyone involved in the field of virtual reality is to create an environment that is indistinguishable from the real world. However, that is easier said than done. Immense effort has been put into the development of VR, but technology still needs to advance a little more in order to actually make VR happen. So, currently, the ramifications of current VR technology can’t be physically proven, but that doesn’t stop people who imagine what life could be like with VR as an everyday tool. The world of science fiction and fantasy has explored all sides of how immersive the system can be, the moral implications of such a perfect recreation of reality, and the societal impacts of virtual reality. Movies like The Matrix show a world where the majority of the population live their life in a virtual world. Others like Gamer show how people could coexist with virtual reality in their lives. These all allow society to examine what VR could be like and analyze all the possibilities, good and bad, that could come from using this technology. However, while fantasy can imagine fantastical technologies that don’t exactly have to make sense, the real world is slightly different.
In the real world, virtual reality systems generally use a combination of technologies to achieve full user immersion. Usually a Head-Mounted Display (HMD) (shown in Figure 1) is used to allow the user to look around and visually explore the world, as well as some sort of tracking which is used to track the body’s movements in the real world and translate them into movements in the virtual world. Other technologies that can be added to a VR system include sound, physical feedback (feeling a bullet impact or a punch, for example), and even touch. While all of these methods have been explored in fiction, researchers and developers have been struggling to even master the basic tools needed for a virtual reality system.
However, research is still being done and as technology improves, the ability to achieve full immersion becomes closer and closer to reality. The applications of virtual reality are diverse and numerous. Researchers in the medical field use virtual reality to not only simulate what operating on a patient is like, but also to perform surgeries across large distances, using robotic arms on the patient’s end and a virtual set-up on the surgeon’s end (H.Kent,2001). In addition, the military is using virtual reality to help train their soldiers, creating extremely realistic scenarios to operate through without any of the risk (p.zorn,2013). While these fields are all very important and each deserves dedicated virtual reality researchers in their own right, there is one field that doesn’t really get the attention it deserves: virtual reality in video games.