Neo reaches for the red pill sitting in Morpheus’s hand and with that action, he realises that The Matrix is a huge virtual reality. The Matrix gave virtual reality a bad reputation- an evil virtual reality where blurring of real life and the virtual world become intermeshed to such an extent that the characters are unable to tell the difference from the real and virtual environments.
Virtual Reality (VR) is when someone interacts with something that isn’t actually real. Ilda Ladeira, a Computer Science PHD student at UCT, says that most people believe VR is a “fancy” technology. “What people don’t realise is that when they are playing a game on an average computer- you are experiencing VR.”
Rainbow 6, Tomb Raider, Second Life and the Sims, all use VR to convince the viewer that what they are seeing is a form of reality. Ladeira explains that “presence” is the feeling of actually ‘being there’. “Immersion is how much a simulation envelops the human senses. Realism is how realistic a simulation is and fidelity is concerned with how closely a simulation matches the real physical phenomenon.”
Lara Croft from the game, Tomb Raider
Ladeira says that gaming can help people. “They get a lot of enjoyment from it with each level.”
For instance, if someone wanted to be a pilot, but for some reason could not, games such as Flight Simulator enables them to experience what it is like to fly around a real place in the world.
Virtual reality: ‘real’ benefits
However, VR is not only used in gaming. VR is used for lots of training- combat training, fire fighting training and flight training. People are using it a lot for therapy for systematic desensitisation.
People with particular phobias would progressively be exposed to whatever it is they fear through VR but within “a safe, non-dangerous environment”. It is also being used to train doctors in virtual surgeries where virtual patients are operated on, reducing the risk to actual real-life patients.
Secrets to the past
Ladeira’s Masters focused on virtual reality and storytelling. It was a process of translating indigenous San people’s stories into a virtual environment so people can experience what it was like to experience that story around a fire with a storyteller. Virtual reality technology enables someone to take an experience and translate it into a virtual reality.
Another way VR is being used by Ladeira is “preserving cultural heritage by trying to preserve memories that people can’t visit. It is the intangible cultural heritage…an intangible experience…you can’t put it in a museum, but maybe recreate it and preserve it in that way.”
Some heritage sites are now being scanned using 3D-laser scanning and the data is processed into a 3D virtual reality version of that site. Virtual tours can be conducted online and this means that people all over the world are able to visit that site in a virtual realm. An example of this is the interactive virtual tour of Dudley Castle c1550 in England.
2 Comments
October 7, 2008 at 3:45 pm
This post misses an important question. To what degree do our real and lived relations influence our interactions in the virtual sphere? To what degree do our fantasies and visions play themselves out in a virtual playground? And to what degree are suggestions that users who immerse themselves in virtual environments – anomic and even potentially apolitical.
Oddly enough, most research shows that increased levels of online and community interaction generally implies either equal or higher levels of socio-political involvement.
Go a little deeper with your posts.
November 24, 2009 at 7:38 pm
I know this comment comes very late after the post but I just stumbled on this now. It’s a pretty good summary of the talk I gave – thank-you!
@Jude, you raise a number of good questions and believe me they are being researched. I did not go into it in the talk as it was meant to be publicly accessible talk for school kids. But you might be pleased to know that a fellow student is looking at the interplay of lived experiences, expectations and experiences in a virtual space.