Category Archives: Virtual Reality

According to the latest report by IMARC Group, titled, Virtual Reality HeadsetMarket: Global Industry Trends, Share, Size, Growth, Opportunity and Forecast 2021-2026, provide theglobal virtual reality headset marketexpected to grow at a CAGR of 28% during 2021-2026.

Report Metric

Historical: 2015-2020

Base Year: 2020

Forecast Year: 2021-2026

Download free sample of the report:https://www.imarcgroup.com/video-wall-market/requestsample

Industry Definition and Application:

A virtual reality (VR) headset is a head-worn device that allows users to experience three-dimensional (3D) simulation while watching VR content. The main components of the headset include a stereoscopic head-mounted display, head motion tracking sensors and stereo sound module. The VR headset creates an artificial environment, making the virtual world appear as real to the users. This is accomplished by creating a seamless virtual environment and tracking the head movement of the user to give the impression of being inside the 3D setup. The headset is connected to a computer or console for sending the video feed or utilizes a mounted smartphone as both the screen and content source.

Browse full report with TOC:https://www.imarcgroup.com/virtual-reality-headset-market

Note:We are regularly tracking the direct effect ofCOVID-19on the market, along with the indirect influence of associated industries. These observations will be integrated into the report.

Market Trends and Drivers:

The rising popularity of VR games and apps, as well as 360? videos, among consumers is one of the primary factors driving the global VR headset market. In line with the growing product demand, the leading companies are investing in improving the product features and introducing smartphone compatible and affordable variants. They are also incorporating additional features, such as NFC chips and Bluetooth connectivity, in assembled VR headset kits. Other than the gaming and entertainment industries, VR technology is being utilized in the healthcare, defense, retail and construction sectors. For instance, VR headsets are used in the healthcare industry for surgical learning, emergency room training, and studying patient-specific anatomy. They also serve distinctive military purposes, including flight and battlefield, and vehicle simulations.

Virtual Reality Headset Market Segmentation:

The report has segmented on the basis of Product, Material, End-Use and geography

By Product:

By Material:

By End-User:

By Region:

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Originally posted here:

Global Virtual Reality (VR) Headset Market Size to Expand at a CAGR of 28% during 2021-2026 - The Market Writeuo - The Market Writeuo

Fully Immersive Spatial Audio has the potential to change the face of the VR industry as we know it.

Its not a new technology by any means, and its been around for at least 100 years prior to this moment but its never quite been applied to the development of Virtual Reality quite like now, and were seeing great leaps and bounds in technology and the way people are immersed in their virtual worlds.

Virtual Reality becomes pretty useless to the user when it isnt an immersive experience, and the burden falls on the developers of VR hardware and software to ensure that the experience is as close to real-life as possible. It has to make you feel like youre right in the middle of what youre looking at and its not enough to be looking at a scene through VR glasses when you want the full experience.

True immersion for Virtual Reality involves being able to engage all of the senses at once sight, smell, taste, touch and sound; though we know that taste and smell arent nearly as necessary for VR to work as the rest.Could we go as far as to say that the senses required for VR immersion is sight, touch and sound?

How do you judge whether or not something is real? In the first Matrix movie, Morpheus asks Neo if what he can smell, taste or touch is real and then goes on to show him that the construct of real he had known was just about fooling these human senses with computerization.

While we havent blacked out the sun yet like in the heavily Dystopian tone of the Matrix movies, the movie got the idea of Virtual Reality pretty spot on. If youre going to fool anyone into thinking its real, fool the senses.

To believe that youre truly immersed in your virtual reality experience, sound and how you experience it is one of the most important parts of the whole VR thrill.

Sound activates a primal reaction within the brain, and sound is often the very first way we react to something; for example, while youre playing a first person shooter, youll be paying the most attention to the sound to find the position of the opposing player on the other hand, while immersed in a VR movie, your mind will pay the most attention to the sound to associate both the sound and the visual aspects with each other.

To put it in its most simple terms, the brain asks itself three questions:

What am I seeing?

What am I hearing?

Do these two things match up?

The first two questions should be answered by the VR experience already and if one of the first two questions arent immersive enough to the user then the brains answer to the third (more important) question that tells your brain how immersed it is (or not) will be a simple no.

We already have the visual aspects of virtual reality developed to a much more advanced degree than some years ago: Virtual Reality goggles are becoming cheaper and easier to access; projects like Google Cardboard have even made experimentation with VR easier.

But when it comes to developing the sound aspects that fit with the visuals, fully immersive spatial audio could be the answer to finally providing the perfect VR experience.

If you want a practical example of why regular audio isnt enough for real VR immersion, then youre going to need to do a little experiment. You can use even the cheapest headphones for this.

There are many songs that illustrate the concept of stereo practically so that you can hear why it matters: Many classics by the Grateful Dead or Led Zeppelin use effects that seem to bounce between one headphone to another. This effect is the stereo effect and it sounds pretty damn cool, especially through the right quality headphones.

But thats not all it is: Its also something very important to your brain.

Audio tells you where things are. If you were to close your eyes and listen, your brain relies on the position of sound to form a clearer picture and the same applies to VR, when your visual input is being replaced with a picture seen on a VR screen.

In order for your brain to be truly immersed in the VR experience, your brain needs to be able to relate to 3-dimensional sound sound that tells you more about the environment youre in, which is (in this case) a virtual one.

If the audio is off, your brain will notice that something is wrong and it just wont sound right.

When things around you dont sound quite right to your brain like weve just explained above, your brain automatically assumes that theres something wrong with the entire environment and the whole VR setup starts to disappear for your brain, much like the glitch in the Matrix when the cat appears twice.

It means theyve changed something. Your brain knows something is wrong when the audio doesnt match, when it doesnt truly immerse you in what youre seeing but when your brain trusts the two inputs fully, then it tends to trust the entire concept of immersion more.

You can fool your brain into experiencing a fuller virtual reality world but only if you use sound immersion right.

Fully Immersive Spatial Audio isnt a new technology by any means; its something sound engineers have known about for decades but were seeing more and more reason to use this technology within VR because it offers a far more full-bodied sound experience that gets us a little closer to experience real virtual reality.

Fully immersive spatial audio makes use of several different techniques in order to round off the sound experience, turning it into a truly 3D sound experience that positions different sounds in the room or virtual environment so that your brain forms a much fuller image.

There are many techniques used in the development of fully immersive spatial audio, including the use of heightened speakers that add an element never-before-seen in speaker systems: Height.

Think about your average surround sound system it surrounded the viewer as much as it possibly could, but one of the elements that was very rarely accurately added was height: Sure, you could tell that a sound was coming from one side or another, but you couldnt tell the finer details like how close to the floor this sound might have been.

Are you starting to see the difference between simple surround sound and fully immersive spatial audio?

Fully immersive spatial audio offers three dimensions, and space to sound where you previously wouldnt have had such a deeply immersive experience: It offers height, depth, reality: The real elements that youre looking for when were talking about VR.

The applications of immersive sound for achieving real reality within VR are immense and it also opens up a whole new world of opportunity for both sound engineers and developers, who might have to explore the field of immersive sound more in the form of workshops.

There are plenty of workshops (and them some) that explain the basics of immersive sound, how it works and how they can apply practical techniques to their sound recording (and playback) to ensure for a better sound experience.

Sound tells you everything you need to know about your immediate environment, and spatial immersive sound attempts to fill in all of the gaps that your brain needs to know about the essential elements.

If your brain doesnt receive a 3D answer about these questions one that positions the brain, the sound and the environment all at once then the experience just cant be called immersive enough to be called real Virtual Reality.

The importance of fully immersive spatial audio cant be underestimated for anyone who needs to have the fully immersive experience. If you want to fool the brain completely, it turns out that you have to fool the right senses at the same time.

More:

Fully Immersive Spatial Audio and Why It Matters In VR - BBN Times

In his latest ask me anything (AMA) on Instagram, Vice President of Facebook Reality Labs Andrew Bosworth said hes convinced that Facebook will reach its goal of 10 million VR users sooner than initially anticipated.

Back in 2019 at Oculus Connect, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg said that VR platforms would need to reach a threshold of around 10 million users in order to be a sustainable and profitable ecosystem for developers.

Once we get to, and cross, this threshold [of 10 million users], we think the content and the ecosystem will just explode, Zuckerberg said in the OC5 keynote speech. He then went on to announce the original Oculus Quest headset, which marked a huge shift in Facebooks VR strategy, moving away from wired PC VR experiences and focusing predominantly on the new standalone Quest platform.

With the success of the original Quest and the seemingly even greater success of Quest 2, Bosworth is almost certain that the all-important 10 million threshold will be met earlier than the company expected. Heres a transcription of his response and full answer:

When will Oculus have 10 million users?

Bosworth: You know, Im not going to answer this question, because I dont know the answer to it, but we are doing really well. When we set that goal and talked about it at Connect, we had a timeframe in mind that it would happen on, and Im very convinced its going to happen earlier than we had initially expected.

Back in January, Zuckerberg said that Quest 2 was on track to be the first mainstream virtual reality headset. While he didnt give any concrete sales numbers, a more recent recall listing revealed that 4 million Quest 2 facial interfaces (included with both the Quest 2 headset and the Fit Pack accessory kit) were shipped in the US. Although its still not a direct sales unit, the 4 million number does give us a rough ballpark of how many Quest 2s have shipped in the US.

Combined with sales of the original Quest headset, you can start to put together a picture of how Facebook might be heading towards 10 million users on the Quest platform sooner than it anticipated.

See more here:

Facebook's Bosworth 'Convinced' Oculus Will Reach 10 Million Users Earlier Than Expected - UploadVR

When Neill Blomkamp set out to make his first horror film, there were a few things he knew for sure. He knew he wanted to work low-budget, he knew he wanted demonic possession to be part of the story, and he knew he wanted to push the envelope of filmmaking technology through the use of "real-time computer graphics." After several years of experimental filmmaking through his company Oats Studios, it was time to move some of that experimentation into the feature-length realm.

"This idea of using volumetric capture and real-time computer graphics was one of the primary reasons I wanted to make the film," Blomkamp told SYFY WIRE. "And because I knew we were making something along the lines of these low budget horror movies, when you combine the idea of wanting to do real-time computer graphics, and then you think of all of these horror movies, when you blend them, it's like: 'Well, let's use the trope of demonic possession, and then what happens with that if we put it into a computer-generated world, what would that look like?' So that started leading to thoughts like, maybe the person who is possessed is in a coma and they're using VR as a way to stretch their legs."

That marriage of technological intrigue and horror storytelling eventually became Demonic, Blomkamp's next feature film, which tells a mother-daughter story rooted in trauma, possession, and fear, with a technological bent that pushes it into science fiction territory. To make the sci-fi element pop, Blomkamp decided to make extensive use of volumetric capture technology, using dozens of cameras all working at once to create three-dimensional renderings of his stars that could then be placed inside the film's virtual world. It's still an emerging technique in the realm of feature filmmaking, and Demonic's virtual horrors made use of it more than any other film to date.

The result is a film laced with sequences that look unlike any other horror movie you'll see this year, as Blomkamp's characters walk through a haunting virtual landscape that, in reality, was represented by a massive cage-like structure of cameras in an otherwise empty room.

"I mean, definitely the most psychologically challenging was the volcap stuff," Blomkamp explained. "The volumetric capture was by far the hardest because the actors are basically in a cage with 260 4K cameras aimed at them, and it's the most unreal, totally synthetic environment you could put an actor in. Even for me, and for the VFX supervisor, I'm trying to picture them in the location that they're going to be in, and then from a technical standpoint, we have to move them through the location."

Shot last summer with a small cast and crew in British Columbia, Demonic tells the story of Carly (Carly Pope), a woman haunted by a traumatic experience in her past linked to her estranged mother Angela (Nathalie Boltt). That past comes calling again when Carly learns that Angela is not just in a coma, but being treated by a company that's testing a new experimental therapy that taps into Angela's brain. Though she's comatose, by putting on a special headset, Carly can actually venture into her mother's mindscape, making contact with the woman locked inside her own body. Once inside, though, Carly finds more than just an awkward reunion with the mother she'd left behind.

To create a clear division between the real world and the mindscape, Blomkamp envisioned a process in which every virtual reality sequence Carly enters would be done through "volumetric capture" or "volcap," which would create real-time, three-dimensional images of the actors as they moved through space. Those images would then be placed inside 3D renderings of real locations, creating a realistic depiction of the prototype virtual reality technology in the film's story. In the gallery below, you can see the step-by-step process of how this all unfolded, from the initial volcap process to early effects work to use a "virtual camera" to frame the scene. Then, finally, there's the finished shot.

To achieve the level of volcap he was looking for, Blomkamp and his team drafted Tobias Chen's company Volumetric Camera Systems, which had already been working at that point with productions including Another Life and Altered Carbon to create volcap scans of actors, often for pre-visualization purposes. When Blomkamp came calling, though, Chen knew he and his team would have to level up.

"When you're doing this kind of volumetric capture of these holograms, what you're doing is, you're doing 30 or 60 3D scans, every single second," Chen explained. "And it's a sequence of 3D scans, not just one 3D scan. And Neill wanted to do these volcap scans of all the actors for every single shutter in the movie. So you would have 3D data of the background and you'd have 3D data of the actors."

To create the backgrounds, producer Mike Blomkamp and his team went out to real physical locations and performed three-dimensional scans of those environments for use in the final product, while Chen and his team began working on the volcap stage for the actors. That's where things got especially tricky.

When you think about actors performing on a blank stage while a crew captures their work to be composited into a film later, you probably imagine something like Avatar or Benedict Cumberbatch crawling across a soundstage to play Smaug in The Hobbit. At this point in filmmaking history, audiences are used to stories of actors performing against nothing for motion capture, so they can be transformed into characters along the way. As Chen explains it, though, volumetric capture is another matter.

"They have the actor wear these mocap suits or put these dots all over their body. And it uses cameras to track only those points. What we did in Demonic is we're not only tracking points, but we're tracking every single pixel on every single point on them. It's tracking every possible thing that the cameras captured, then computing that into a 3D model," Chen said. "So you're not only capturing the movements like you are in Avatar, but you're capturing all the textures, all the geometry, all the clothes, hair, everything all at once. So it's more like you're capturing a hologram of a person rather than just capturing their motions and then applying those motions onto a CG character."

That need to capture everything all at once means that the actor needs to be surrounded by a large framework of cameras, all working at the same time. Because camera resolution naturally works best if an actor is up-close, the further away from each camera the actor is, the trickier a high-resolution image can be, which is why volcap has, until now, typically only centered on one performer in a very small space. For Chen, a key challenge was adapting his system to Blomkamp's desire to go bigger.

"What Neill wanted to do, which was really crazy, was he wanted to scan maybe two people, three people, five people at once," Chen said. "So instead of needing this little one meter space, now we needed a five meter space, which means you need a crapload more cameras. And then all the cameras are so much further from the actor."

He continued, "There's a thing called inverse square law. It's like the further you are away from the source of information, it's not doubling the distance. It doesn't just make it twice as bad. It's actually exponential. Everything gets exponentially worse the further away you are. Because of that, we needed to use so many more cameras to capture this data that it ended up being 239 cameras, all recording 4K video at once. So I think, in the end of it, we captured 400 terabytes of data. So processing that was a challenge, to say the least."

Volumetric Camera Systems' work was eventually sent over to Universal Production Partners in the Czech Republic to create the final visual effects, tweaking the shots, playing with the lighting, and developing the eventual look of the film. When you watch Demonic, some shots might look like you're seeing a particularly gnarly video game glitch as Carly moves through the virtual space of her mother's mind, but according to Blomkamp, that's exactly the point.

"This is exactly why I wanted to use volumetric capture at some point in the movie, because the [low-budget] horror world is a place that would allow you to write the use of volcap into the script in a way where its glitches and errors would be accepted by the audience," Blomkamp said. "It's the only way that you could do it currently, because the technology isn't high resolution enough to narratively justify it within the story. So it's a prototype or it's glitchy or people don't really know what it is, and that's precisely what we did, and then once you've done that then you can kind of just let it be as sh***y as you want it to look, which is exactly my jam."

Though Demonic does spend plenty of its runtime in the real world, the final effect of the volcap process is an eerie journey into another landscape. Within the film's story, it works as an unsettling exercise in sci-fi horror. Within the larger filmmaking world outside of the story, it marks what Chen described as an unprecedented push forward in volcap creativity.

"It was intimidating because no one's ever done anything like this. And the difference between what we were doing, when we were [doing early volcap tests] with just a few dozen cameras versus going all the way to using 239 cameras... pretty much, as far as I know, this is the largest camera array that's ever been constructed in the world. There has never been anyone that's put 239 cameras, all recording into 4K together in one system."

Demonic is in theaters and on-demand on Aug. 20. Check back next week for more of our coverage of the film.

The rest is here:

First Look: How Neill Blomkamp's 'Demonic' broke new ground with its virtual horror show - SYFY WIRE

Carmen Logieput on a virtual reality headset for the first time three years ago. Shewatched a short film about a Liberian womans experience in the Ebola epidemic.

It was a life-changing moment, says Logie, an associate professor in the University of TorontosFactor-Inwentash Faculty of Social Work. I felt like I was there with her. It was such a powerful way to develop empathy.

I immediately started thinking about how I could use this amazing technology in my work on health equity.

So, Logie began investigating VRhealth-care applications and quickly discovered a body of evidence from high-income countries demonstrating its mental health-care benefits, specifically in improving mood, reducing stress and teaching self-care.

But there was no evidence on how it could help in low-income countries or humanitarian contexts, Logie says.

Three years later, Logie is launching a study of a VR intervention focused on mental health in urban refugees and displaced youth.Working closely with youth and local community partners in Uganda, which hosts the third-largest number of refugees in the world, her team will develop a VR experience aimed at improving mental health literacy, reducing mental health stigmaand decreasing symptoms of depression.

Logies previous research found alarmingly high rates of depression among refugee and displaced young people living in five informal settlements commonly called slums in Kampala, Ugandas capital. Nearly three-quarters of young women and about half of young men aged 16 to 24 reported depression symptoms.

Now that weve measured this urgent problem, were focused on designing and measuring solutions, says Logie, who is Canada Research Chair in Global Health Equity and Social Justice with Marginalized Populations.

In addition to VR, the study will evaluate other mental health interventions delivered via text messages and web-based applications bothalone and in combination with VR. These will include psychological first aid, a World Health Organization approach that trains laypeople to provide practical support and care.

The VR content employed will be based on interviews with youth and community partners to understand the key factors that influence mental wellbeing, as well as strategies they find effective in managing stress. The plan is to co-develop a 30-minute VR session half of which will be devoted to a youth describing what its like to live with mental health challenges.

They might be walking through their community talking about their depression and how theyve felt stigmatized, says Logie. Then maybe theyll demonstrate some of the self-help approaches theyve learned and how they access formal mental health support.

Those watching the session through VR, meanwhile, will be immersed in the storytellers 3D environment.

The second half of the session will be interactive, allowing users to choose an avatar and practise coping strategies in virtual settings.Naimul Khan, director of the Ryerson University Multimedia Research Laband an expert on designing user-centred VR systems, is leading the VR design, development and implementation.

Mental health concerns disproportionately affect refugees and internally displaced individuals. And, despite the fact that 40 per cent of the more than 80 milliondisplaced people globally are under 18 years old, Logie says most studies on mental health interventions have focused on either young children or adults.

Theres a knowledge gap around what works with adolescent refugees that we want to help fill, she says. We also know very little about mental wellbeing among refugee youth living in urban areas, rather than formal refugee settlements, or camps.

Urban refugees tend to be overlooked because theyre more dispersed, adds Logie, even they confront unique pressures beyond the trauma of war and losing their homes. Unlike refugees in camps, where some food, sanitation and shelter is provided, urban refugees rarely have adequate access to the essentials.

Logie says it took some persistence to bring her VR idea to fruition. She initially acquired a headset and brought it to Uganda so her research collaborators could try it out. They had the same reaction as me: weve got to find a way to use it, she says. Butsecuring funding for a novel investigation of a relatively leading-edge technology wasnt easy. I was getting the message from grant application reviewers that VR was more suited to high-income countries, Logie says.

Logie acknowledges that its vital to adapt technology requirements to suit low-income contexts, but says the cost of VR headsets which can be sanitized and shared by community agencies continues to fall. Why shouldnt somebody in a refugee camp or slum access a digital tool that someone in Toronto is using to boost their mental health?

Grand Challenges Canada, an agency funded by the Canadian government and other partners, awarded the study $250,000 through their Global Mental Health Program the third project of Logies it has funded.

Logie says the research is ready to launch. The interview process will begin later this summer, VR development will take place through the falland the VR intervention will be implemented and evaluated in Kampala starting in the new year.

Read more from the original source:

U of T researcher uses VR to improve mental health of urban refugees, displaced youth - News@UofT

Researchers have developed a new game that combines artificial intelligence and virtual reality to help ease the pain for children undergoing medical treatments.

Virtual reality games could provide a new type of distraction therapy that may help young patients cope better with pain.

Developed by University of Malta researchers, the game illustrates an island populated by animals and allows players to engage and focus on the colourful and magical landscape.

Players physiological data is monitored in real time and artificial intelligence is used to detect heart rate and other body signals to infer a patients state and adjust the game accordingly. If AI notices that the player is not engaged enough, the game will introduce entertaining challenges.

The technology has been developed as part of the MORPHEUS project led by Prof. Alexiei Dingli and Luca Bondin from the Department of Artificial Intelligence at the University of Malta. The game has been developed in collaboration with Fabrizio Cali as lead designer, and supervised by Prof. Vince Briffa from the Faculty of Media and Knowledge Science.

MORPHEUS is a project of the University of Malta funded by Epic For Good Foundation.

The game will be rolled out for child cancer patients at the Sir Anthony Mamo Oncology Centre in Malta and at a later date available for the public.

View post:

Virtual reality game that reads body signals will ease pain for child cancer patients - MaltaToday

Todays virtual reality technologies build upon ideas that date back to the 1800s, almost to the very beginning of practical photography. In 1838, the first stereoscope was invented, using twin mirrors to project a single image. That eventually developed into the View-Master, patented in 1939 and still produced today.

The use of the term virtual reality, however, was first used in the mid-1980s when Jaron Lanier, founder of VPL Research, began to develop the gear, including goggles and gloves, needed to experience what he called virtual reality.

Even before that, however, technologists were developing simulated environments. One milestone was the Sensorama in 1956. Morton Heiligs background was in the Hollywood motion picture industry. He wanted to see how people could feel like they were in the movie. The Sensorama experience simulated a real city environment, which you rode through on a motorcycle. Multisensory stimulation let you see the road, hear the engine, feel the vibration, and smell the motors exhaust in the designed world.

Heilig also patented a head-mounted display device, called the Telesphere Mask, in 1960. Many inventors would build upon his foundational work.

By 1965, another inventor, Ivan Sutherland, offered the Ultimate Display, a head-mounted device that he suggested would serve as a window into a virtual world.

The 1970s and 1980s were a heady time in the field. Optical advances ran parallel to projects that worked on haptic devices and other instruments that would allow you to move around in the virtual space. At NASA Ames Research Center in the mid-1980s, for example, the Virtual Interface Environment Workstation (VIEW) system combined a head-mounted device with gloves to enable the haptic interaction.

Todays current virtual reality gear owes a debt of gratitude to the pioneering inventors of the past six decades who paved the way for the low-cost, high-quality devices which are easily accessible. Be sure to visit the VR flight simulators at The Franklin Institute to experience a virtual environment yourself!

Read the rest here:

History of Virtual Reality | The Franklin Institute

See some real examples ofVirtual Reality shopping apps; or fora look ahead, check out the5 top Virtual Reality and Augmented Reality technology trends for 2019. This post was last updated on June 7, 2019.

Virtual Reality (VR) is the use of computer technology to create a simulated environment. Unlike traditional user interfaces, VR places the user inside an experience. Instead of viewing a screen in front of them, users are immersedand able to interact with3D worlds. By simulating as many senses as possible, such as vision, hearing,touch, evensmell,the computer is transformed into agatekeeper to thisartificial world.The only limits to near-real VR experiences are the availability of content and cheapcomputing power.

Virtual Reality and Augmented Reality are two sides of the same coin. You could think of Augmented Reality as VR with one foot in the real world: Augmented Reality simulates artificial objects in the real environment; Virtual Reality creates an artificial environment to inhabit.

In Augmented Reality, the computer uses sensors and algorithms to determine the position and orientation of a camera. AR technology then renders the 3D graphics as they would appear from the viewpoint of the camera, superimposing the computer-generated images over ausers view of the real world.

In Virtual Reality, the computer uses similar sensors and math. However,rather than locating a real camera within a physical environment, the position of the users eyes are located within the simulated environment. If the users head turns, the graphics react accordingly. Rather than compositing virtual objects and a real scene, VR technology creates a convincing, interactive world for the user.

Virtual Realitys most immediately-recognizable component is the head-mounted display (HMD). Human beings are visual creatures, and display technology is often the single biggest difference between immersive Virtual Reality systems and traditional user interfaces. For instance,CAVEautomatic virtual environments actively display virtual content onto room-sized screens. While they arefun for people in universities and big labs, consumer and industrial wearables are the wild west.

With a multiplicity of emerging hardware and software options, the future of wearables is unfolding but yet unknown. Concepts such as the HTC Vive Pro Eye, Oculus Quest and Playstation VR are leading the way, but there are also players like Google, Apple, Samsung, Lenovo and others who may surprise the industry with new levels of immersion and usability. Whomever comes out ahead, the simplicity of buying a helmet-sized device that can work in a living-room, office, or factory floor has made HMDs center stage when it comes to Virtual Reality technologies.

Convincing Virtual Reality applications require more than just graphics. Both hearing and vision are central to a persons sense of space. In fact, human beings react more quickly to audio cues than to visual cues. In order to create truly immersive Virtual Realityexperiences, accurate environmental soundsand spatial characteristics are a must. Theselenda powerful sense of presence toa virtual world. To experience the binaural audio details that go into a Virtual Reality experience, put on some headphones and tinkerwith this audio infographicpublished byThe Verge.

While audio-visual information is most easily replicated in Virtual Reality, active research and development efforts are still being conducted into the other senses. Tactile inputs such as omnidirectional treadmills allow users to feel as though theyre actually walking through a simulation, rather than sitting in a chair or on a couch. Haptic technologies, also known as kinesthetic ortouch feedback tech, have progressed from simple spinning-weight rumble motors to futuristic ultrasound technology. It is now possible to hear and feel true-to-life sensations along with visual VR experiences.

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What is Virtual Reality? VR Definition and Examples | Marxent

Escape into your own world with virtual reality technology.

The idea of interacting with a digital world isnt new, as movies like Tron (1982) and Spy Kids 3-D (2003) have brought conceptual technology to life on the big screen. But in todays world, those same consumers can now interact with their own digital space.

From gaming and social networking to education and marketing, there are many applications for this type of emerging tech. Youve probably already participated in a virtual reality experience and didnt even know it.

Unlike augmented reality, virtual reality is a fully digital experience that can either simulate or differ completely from the real world. The term virtual reality refers to a computer-generated, three-dimensional environment. In order to experience and interact with virtual reality, youll need the proper equipment, like a pair of VR glasses or a headset.

Virtual reality technology is used to create immersive experiences that can help educate and even entertain consumers. Outside of its popular gaming use case, virtual reality is applied in a variety of industries, such as medicine, architecture, military, and others.

Everything that makes up our perception of reality is due to our senses. So, in theory, everyones reality is unique to them. Taking that a step further, it would make sense that if you provided your sense with other simulated or computer-generated information, your perception of reality would change creating a new, virtual one.

Because VR tech creates a completely 3-D environment, you can imagine the amount of software involved. VR software works together with VR hardware to immerse the user into the virtual world. Developers also have to create interactive components within the environments that look and even feel like the real deal.

Virtual reality software can be used to build experiences for consumers to virtually test products, learn something new, or build something themselves. Believe it or not, there are even VR social platforms! Learn more about the types of software required to create these types of user experiences, like VR content management systems, SDKs, and more.

VR hardware is used in conjunction with the software to provide the illusion of being in a 3-D environment. Common hardware includes VR glasses, gloves, and other accessories to simulate other senses like touch.

There are three main types of virtual reality used today to transform the world around us, including non-immersive, semi-immersive, and fully-immersive simulations.

To get a better understanding of how the technology is used, lets break down the different types of VR and see examples of each.

Chances are when you think of VR, youre picturing a fully-immersive experience complete with head-mounted displays, headphones, gloves, and maybe a treadmill or some kind of suspension apparatus.

This type of VR is commonly used for gaming and other entertainment purposes in VR arcades or even in your home (empty, non-fragile room advised.)

Fully-immersive simulations give users the most realistic experience possible, complete with sight and sound. The VR headsets provide high-resolution content with a wide field of view. Whether youre flying or fighting the bad guys, youll feel like youre really there.

Semi-immersive experiences provide users with a partially virtual environment to interact with. This type of VR is mainly used for educational and training purposes and the experience is made possible with graphical computing and large projector systems.

In this example, the instruments in front of the pilot are real and the windows are screens displaying virtual content.

Its important to keep in mind that semi-immersive VR simulations still give users the perception of being in a different reality. This type of virtual reality is not always possible to experience wherever. Instead, physical environments are created to supplement the virtual reality.

Non-immersive simulations are often forgotten as an actual type of VR, honestly because its very common in our everyday lives.

The average video game is technically considered a non-immersive virtual reality experience. Think about it, youre sitting in a physical space, interacting with a virtual one.

These types of experiences have become more advanced in recent years with video games like Wii Sports, where the system actually detects your motion and translates it on screen.

People consume more content across more mediums today than ever before. As brands begin to leverage emerging technology like virtual reality, these experiences will start to take hold in our daily lives.

The possibilities for VR are endless, learn more about emerging trends in this area of tech.

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What Is Virtual Reality? (+3 Types of VR Experiences)

Conclusions and Future Directions

IVR is a system that blocks out the physical world, providing rich sensory fidelity wherein the user feels and responds to the virtual world, as if it were real. However, little is known about how IVR relates to child development. The little research examining young children and IVR suggests that they may have experiences unique to their age range. Brain development, EF, dual representation, and self-recognition (i.e., avatars, virtual doppelgangers, and TSI) in virtual environment may be important topics to consider regarding research on children's experiences in IVR. Basic questions related to presence, safety, and virtual characters in IVR also need to be answered before taking the steps to create effective content. For example, in IVR, virtual characters can mimic the child's behaviors, provide varying degrees of eye contact, or vary in size, with each of these factors potentially influencing the child's social behavior and learning. While television research provides the foundation for children's VR research, IVR can create content not possible in the physical world, and could elicit unknown reactions (i.e., emotional responses to standing in front of a virtual character 3 times the child's size).

Children may have strong reactions to IVR because they are still developing the skill of experiencing fully immersive technologies. For instance, there is some speculation that older children's attention to television content is less susceptible to formal features (e.g., cuts, zooms, music) because through experience, they have learned when and how to watch content based on those features (Anderson & Kirkorian, 2013). Perhaps, as children gain more experience with IVR, they will learn a type of immersive formal feature skill that could help them navigate in and out of immersive technologies. How children experience IVR may relate to their higher-order cognitive skills such as EF and dual representation, because the salient sensory feedback in IVR could challenge their behavioral and emotional regulation. If IVR could easily pull children into the content and elicit automatic responses related to attention and action, it may be a platform to develop new ways of measuring EF skills such as inhibitory control.

On November 8, 2015, the New York Times gave their Sunday print subscribers access to VR (Somaiya, 2015; Wohlsen, 2015). Placed neatly and easily in their newspapers, more than a million people had an inexpensive piece of cardboard in which after just a couple of minutes they could fold into an HMD that uses their phone as the screen. For the first time, millions of people had access to VR at the same time. Wired magazine writer, Wohlsen (2015), highlighted the potential implications of children having greater access to IVR, he writes, But for good or ill, [the cardboard HMD] is just good enough to imprint a new paradigm on a nation of 8-year-olds. From now on, kids who've had the VR experience have a new set of expectations of what it should mean to interact with a computer. Imagine what they'll expect by the time they're 18. Although it had limited content and on the lower end of some immersive features (i.e., level of tracking), the New York Times roll out of VR demonstrated the children's access to immersive technologies is here.

Research with adult populations has shown IVR to have powerful effects on attitudes, behaviors, and physiology. IVR can be a technology that provides high degrees of immersion placing users directly into digital content, creating the illusion that the experience is real. Some research suggests that young children may experience virtual content differently from adults. Researchers, scholars, and VR developers need to examine the developmental issues related to the intersection of the immersive features and content of IVR further to determine what use of the technology are appropriate for which ages and how IVR can be used to enhance youth's lives. Children and adolescents are avid and early adopters of media. With broad access to VR breaching the horizon, it is expected that all ages will be interacting with immersive virtual environments. More than ever, it is a time to understand what these technological experiences mean for being a kid and what it means for human development.

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