Comments T3.9

Michael Rosenberg

Hi Mike -- For purpose of your paper's grade, you may want to relook at the 1st and last sentences and tie them together. Also, unbold the last sentence because it it not part of the quote.

I too did Virtual Reality and liked the research. I agree that it is not just for serious usage. "Virtual reality can be divided into:

• The simulation of a real environment for training and education.
• The development of an imagined environment for a game or interactive story." (1)

I think Virtual Reality is going to be an exciting segment of the computing world and I look forward to being around to enjoy the ride.

(1)http://searchcio-midmarket.techtarget.com/definition/virtual-reality

 

 

Joseph Fazio

Joe - Found your research interesting and informative. It is an unsettling reality that we will and are losing our jobs to robotics. I search for some stats and found this.

Marshall Brain who is the founder of the website HowStuffWorks, projects in his essay "Robotic Nation," humanoid robots will be widely available by the year 2030, and able to replace jobs currently filled by people in areas such as fast-food service, housecleaning and retail. Unless ways are found to compensate for these lost jobs, Brain estimates that more than half of Americans could be unemployed by 2055." (1)

I agree that we need to be aware and find the balance for the future so that man and machine can co-exist.


(1)http://www.wired.com/techbiz/media/news/2003/08/59882

Virtual Reality

Virtual Reality has arrived but what is it, where did it come from, and where is it going. “Virtual reality (VR) is technology which allows a user to interact with a computer-simulated environment through one's senses.” (1) Or as Wikipedia states: “Virtual reality (VR) is a term that applies to computer-simulated environments that can simulate physical presence in places in the real world, as well as in imaginary worlds.” (2) Yet the book talks about “the virtual reality system where more than one users can move and react in a computer-stimulated environment.” (3) Yet the best definition I found was “using computer technology to create a simulated, three-dimensional world that a user can manipulate and explore while feeling as if he were in that world.” (4) I think the last definition does the term justice more than the others. Bottom line is that virtual reality should include three dimensional images that are life size and have the ability to track the eye and head motion of the user and relate the images to that perceptive. So where did this all start?

Virtual Reality goes back to its beginning in 1950s and progressed along to “1968 when Ivan Sutherland, with the help of his student Bob Sproull, created what is widely considered to be the first virtual reality and augmented reality (AR) head mounted display (HMD) system.” (5) At the time it was so heavy it was suspend from the ceiling. It wasn’t until 1980s “the "virtual reality" was popularized by Jaron Lanier, one of the modern pioneers of the field. Lanier had founded the company VPL Research (from "Virtual Programming Languages") in 1985, which developed and built some of the seminal "goggles n' gloves" systems of that decade.” (6)

“Virtual reality entrepreneur John C. Briggs, for one, predicted in the May 2002 issue of Futurist magazine that "in the next 10 to 20 years, VR experiences will be fully integrated into real life." (7) His predictions are coming true. Today will have virtual reality being used to in thousands of applications. These ranging from entertainment like movies and video gaming; medical usages such as the study of a medical procedure to the helping of a disorder that can be recreated in the virtual world to aid in overcoming it; education for our young grade students to college to the military; and business where a company can recreate the actual setting of their products in a store for their people to view and study, while construction is using it to help people see their homes and buildings before they are even built. Some think that sharing of the virtual worlds will be empowering and raise us to a new human level. Jaron Lanier, in a 2002 interview, “shared online gaming already is "like a technology-enhanced version of shared make-believe. . . . With language, we trade symbols, but with this we trade something beyond symbols. We trade experience." (8)

How will it impact the business world, who knows? But it is imperative that the business environment needs to plan strategically for the implementation of virtualization because it will effective every inch of its infrastructure, meaning security, networking, backup and recovery and all of its operational procedures. Looking farther ahead, Ken Pimental and Kevin Teixeira claimed in the book Virtual Marketing: Through the New Looking Glass that "within one hundred years virtual reality could become a semi-invisible service in society, like telephones, light switches, books, and television—a tool for communication, work, and pleasure that we use without thinking about it." (9)

So we answered what it is and where it came from. The future is not a total unknown; Virtual Reality will definitely be part of it. Whether it will make our lives better, that is the unknown.

(1) http://www.newworldencyclopedia.org/entry/Virtual_reality

(2) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virtual_reality

(3) Stair, Ralph M., and George Walter Reynolds. "Chapter 7/page 316." Fundamentals of Information Systems. Boston: Course Technology, 2010. Print.

(4) http://electronics.howstuffworks.com/gadgets/other-gadgets/virtual-reality.htm

(5) http://www.newworldencyclopedia.org/entry/Virtual_reality

(6) http://www.newworldencyclopedia.org/entry/Virtual_reality

(7) http://www.scienceclarified.com/scitech/Virtual-Reality/Which-World-Is-Real-The-Future-of-Virtual-Reality.html

(8) http://www.scienceclarified.com/scitech/Virtual-Reality/Which-World-Is-Real-The-Future-of-Virtual-Reality.html

(9) http://www.scienceclarified.com/scitech/Virtual-Reality/Which-World-Is-Real-The-Future-of-Virtual-Reality.html