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Virtual Reality Essay

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Virtual Reality

Being one of the new up and coming technologies of today, we hear about virtual reality all over but sometimes don’t even know what the term really means. Virtual reality is “a technology that allows the user to go beyond the computer screen and enter a three-dimensional, computer-generated world (Virtual Reality Resources).” In other words, virtual reality is the users interacting with the computer and actually becoming a part of what is happening in the imaginary world, bringing it to life. It is actually a simulation of some aspect of the real world that is basically interactive (Tate). Taking a look at the history of virtual reality it actually began in the late 1950’s with the first supercomputers …show more content…

Shortly after Douglas Engelbart’s inventions, in 1965, scientist Ivan Sutherland also introduced himself into the world of virtual reality. He published a paper describing “The Ultimate Display” and in doing so set the stage for research on Virtual Reality (Virtual Reality Resources). In Sutherlands’ paper, he believed that computers should be more “human compatible.” The computer graphics industry later on honored him with the title of “father of computer graphics” because of his efforts in 2-D and 3-D images. Sutherland also led to the multi-million dollar computer aided design industry by demonstrating the use of a light pen to draw images on a computer screen. In 1966, Sutherland also developed the first computer-based head-mounted display (HMD) (An explanation). With this device, users were able to navigate through and experience the virtual world as we do in the real world by seeing, walking, touching, hearing, etc. Because Sutherland’s HMD was so big and couldn’t even be used as a headpiece, it wasn’t until 1970 that the first fully functional HMD was completed. NASA actually ended up using these HMD’s twenty years later and are still important today. While Engelbart and Sutherland were busy developing their new forms of virtual reality, so was Myron Kruegar. Kruegars, on the other hand, was in the form of a video system and what was later called artificial realities, otherwise known as projected reality. In

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