Kinect and Virtual Reality

Introduction

Virtual reality(VR), refers to computer-simulated environments that can simulate physical presence in places in real, as well as in imaginary world. It could be applied to a wide range of applications, from industrial to educational, from entertainment to defense. Nowadays, with advancements in computer technologies, virtual reality is becoming more important and useful.

I. Technologies related to Virtual Reality

For a normal person, information provided by his/her vision occupies 85-90 percent of total information he/she acquired. Thus the most important part of VR is vision. VR normally requires high quality 3D vision, which could be achieved in several ways:

1. Head-mounted displays: perhaps it is the mostly used solution to 3D vision creation. To create 3D vision, there is a display optic in front of each eye. This solution could give acceptable immersion experience and the biggest advantages are its portability and relatively low cost (comparing with other solutions listed below.

1. Holography: Literately, holography refers to creation of the 3D image of an object so that it appears the real object is present. This is also a frequently used technique in creating virtual reality.

1. Multi-sided Immersive Environment: Such a system usually consists of a physical environment (a room with 4 walls, ceiling and floor, for example) and a set of instruments to provide vision (high definition projectors, for example). Together with 3D surround-sound, this solutions in general gives the best VR experience in terms of immersion. The disadvantages are mainly the high cost as well as poor portability.

In reality, we can interact with the surrounding environment. Thus in VR, interaction is also an important part. Previously, interaction in VR environment was normally through certain pointing device (such as a 3D mouse). Recently, with advancements in motion detection technology such as Microsoft Kinect, interaction in VR could be more natural and intuitive, allowing for better immersion.

II. VR used in training

One of the application of VR is industrial and military training. In these trainings, there are challenges associated, as listed below:

• Engagement and motivation
• Retention improvement
• Cost saving
• Timeline acceleration
• Increasing hands-on experience 

Through traditional training, it is hard to resolve these challenges all together. For example, it is difficult to achieve both cost saving and "Increasing hands-on experience" at the same time for emergency situation handling for a offshore oil plant. While these problems could be solved if VR is used for training. This is why VR is becoming more and more important in training.

(image of VR training)

III. Criteria for VR assessment

During the guest lecture about VR and Interactive 3D solution, the speaker mentioned 3 criteria for assessing an VR implement which are:

• Realism: How realistic the environment is, including vision, sound and other sensations.
• Interaction: How the user interacts with the environment; how intuitive and effective the interaction is.
• Immersion: how well the user immerses into the environment, this largely depends on the above two criteria.

IV. Vision of VR

In the coming future, the trend of VR application is emphasis on real-time, collaborative environment. The environment simulated should be able to respond to the user's interaction in real time; the environment should allow different users to collaborate with each other, for instance, 2 users in different physical locations could virtually play poker in one virtual room, in which they could see "each other".

Conclusion

Virtual reality is an increasingly popular and important field in computer technology research and engineering, for its ever-more importance in the field of entertainment, industry and militia. The future trend of VR is fully-immersive, real-time, collaborative virtual environments. We have reasons to believe that VR is going to change our everyday life int he near future.