VR: What is it Good For?

Building a virtual world inside a computer is a useful thing to do in a surprisingly wide variety of commercial, industrial, scientific, medical, and military applications. A virtual world is easier to control than the real one. If you're an architect who needs to show how the shadows will fall around your new building, virtual reality (VR) can make the sun come up and go down at your will without any magic rituals or messy human sacrifices.

The list of applications goes on: Architects find it can be less expensive to build a VR model than to build a real-world prototype. Automotive and aerospace manufacturers, such as Ford and Lockheed/Martin, routinely build vi rtual models as part of the CA D/CAM process to check ergonomics and help sell a new model before it's even built.

A virtual world can make the invisible visible and the abstract concrete. Many of the scientific, engineering, and financial applications of VR can help us visualize complex data sets derived from say, chemistry, fluid dynamics, or meteorology by turning them into apparently real objects that you can manipulate.

A virtual world can add value to the real world by using telepresence or augmented-reality systems. A camera-equipped robot can travel through a hazardous real place (e.g., a nuclear reactor) while the human's presence is purely virtual. Medical researchers are testing VR systems that can superimpose views of the body's internal organs generated from computer-aided tomography (CAT) scans over the real body to give a surgeon wearing a 3-D headset something like Superman's X-ray vision.

VR is a good gimmick; there's no sense in being precious about this. There are lots of application s, such as point-of-sale display, trade-show booths, and other advertising- or publicity-related activities, where VR is an end in itself--the novelty of the medium sells the message. You probably won't buy a house solely on the strength of a VR walk-through, but the novelty of it might tempt you to go view the real thing.