making virtual environments appear real

The essence of virtual reality is fooling one's body into perceiving things that are only artificially constructed. In this respect, it is not surprising that the human body can respond negatively, especially when it gets contradictory signals from different senses and is not entirely fooled. With respect to sight, a limitation of today's VR image projection systems is disharmony between eye focus (adjusting the lens of each eye at the perceived distance of the object viewed) and eye axial convergence (coordinating the configuration of both eyes to cross lines of sight at the apparent distance of the object). This problem is more acute for HMD systems in which pictures are displayed relatively near to the eyes. Another problem is latency (lagtime) between the kinetic movement impulses that the brain gets from the semicircular canals of the inner ear and the visual motion impulses that the brain gets from one's eyes. In the event of a lag in visual image processing, then the body receives signals of movement from kinetic senses in rapid-response but impulses of movement from vision after lag time. Technical discussion of related VR material at Australian Real Estate Virtuals .

Some science and equipment used in Virtual Reality (VR) systems to track our movement for information transmission from humans to computers include: six-dimensional computer mice and joysticks; instrumented hand machines with mechanical, magnetic, ultrasound or optical monitors that track finger, wrist, and hand location and motion; gesture recognition systems that recognize hand and facial gestures using optical or mechanical monitors; head mounted displays in which motion is detected through mechanical, magnetic, ultrasound or optical sensors; electronically-wired clothing with several signal emitters and/or mechanical, magnetic, ultrasound or optical position monitors; and multi-directional treadmills. These science and equipment each have advantages and disadvantages. Mechanical systems register motion promptly and accurately. However they are often clumsy to use and limit the range of body movement due to the physical connections that they need. Inertial devices require fewer physical connectors, but respond slowly and less accurately. Devices based on magnetism and ultrasound also tend to be slow and magnetic devices can be skewed by nearby ferrous things. One possibility for optical movement measurement involves connecting multiple LEDs to clothing and then tracking the movement of the LEDs via computer, but this method only measures a limited quantity of points on the body. Linked page Virtual Tours Irving, Texas also deals with this material.

See Simulated Robots as well for more material about virtual reality.