The Virtual Reality Headset

Today the virtual environment systems are usually powered by normal personal computers. These personal computers are good enough to run software’s that create virtual environments. Good quality standard graphic cards enable cool graphics quality. The video gaming community mainly uses graphics cards. The same graphic cards you use while playing a high definition video game is also used creating virtual simulations in your machine.

These Virtual Environment systems use HMDs. These are headsets that have two monitors one for each eye. A stereoscopic effect gets created. An illusion of depth is sensed. These HMDs that were created before used cathode ray tube (CRT) monitors. These monitors however bulky provided very good quality resolution and quality. Then there were Liquid Crystal Display (LCD) monitors. However these were much cheaper yet they were way behind in quality s compared with the CRT displays. But today LCD’s are much more advanced. They are the top n good quality resolution color saturation. Mostly now people sue LCDs than CRTs.

Many other VE systems use walls, floor and the ceilings of a room to project images. They cal it Cave Automatic Virtual Environments (CAVE). The University of Illinois of Chicago styled the first CAVE display. They used a rear projection technique. They use a small room, its walls and floors to display images. The users are provided with special glasses and are allowed to move around in the CAVE display. This will complete the depth of illusion. User gets a wider view while moving around in the virtual environment. Immersion is far better here. However the CAVE displays are costlier and occupy more space.

There are also tracking systems who analyze the orientation of the user’s point of view so that in the visual display the exact image is displayed.

Most users need to be attached to some cables and the processing unit to complete this process. However this limits the range of motions available to them. Other Virtual Reality technologies are much more improved than tracker technology.

One of the most important VR systems is the input systems. These input devices range from controllers with two or three buttons to electronic gloves and voice recognition software. No standard control system is present over here. The virtual reality scientists are continuously researching on this matter. They are developing new ways to increase the sense of Telepresence.

Some of the most common input devices uses are:-

  • Joysticks
  • Force balls/tracking balls
  • Controller wands
  • Data gloves
  • Voice recognition
  • Motion trackers/bodysuits
  • Treadmills

Related Articles