Immersive Simulation

Advances in hardware and software have led to impressive advances in the visual and auditory elements of computer-generated environments, but progress in the area of tactile interaction has proven more challenging. Simsation is a development phase site focusing on progress in touch and kinesthetic human-computer interaction. The quantity of sensory methods that should be actively involved and the range of believability that should be achieved so that a human to computer communication to be virtual reality progresses as applied science improves. This is analogous to the escalating criteria for "high performance" audio encoding during the last century -- following progress in analog and digital recording. See defining virtual reality as well for more material regarding virtual reality.

Virtual Reality is a three-dimensional computer-generated setting within which a human participant can perceive and handle objects in three dimensions, in real time, and in a way similar to human interaction with things in the physical world. Interaction with elements in virtual reality varies by scope. Scope considers the number of sensory pathways (vision, hearing, touch, and so forth) and control modalities (e.g. body movement, speech recognition, and others) that are used. This interaction can also vary with respect to completeness (e.g. range of sight, range of hearing, range of haptic engagement, and others) and resolution (vision clarity, hearing, body movement, etc.). Further, methods of human-to-computer interaction deals with such virtual reality matters.

With current technologies, virtual reality is generally defined as involving at a base-line: much of our scope of vision and sound range; computer monitoring and responses to the position, angle, and motion by the participating person's head at a rate of between 50 and 100 responding actions per second; and at least elementary computer responding actions to the location, configuration, movement, and configuration of the participant's hand. With further advances in technology, computer responding actions to the direction of the rest of one's body, quicker responding actions, better tactile and motion interaction, and involvement of the olfactory and gustatory senses might become expected for Virtual Reality (VR). For additional information on VR, you can also check out the role of hearing in virtual reality experience .

Sound can also help in communication from humans to computing systems. Speech recognition is the dominant type. There have been significant progress in the speed and precision of speech recognition in the midst of the past several years. While these advances have been mainly separate from progress in Virtual Reality (VR), the new speech recognition systems can be added to virtual reality with excellent effects. See also the evolution of virtual tours for more VR-related material.