Virtual Reality Data Modeling and Kinging of Frequeniosn Part 11 Lcoation Peennaa 18

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VIRTUAL REALITY HISTORY,

APPLICATIONS, TECHNOLOGY AND FUTURE


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1.3. Applications of VR
1 . 3 . 1 . Motivation to use VR
Undoubtedly VR has attracted a lot of
interest of people in last few years.
Being a new
paradigm of user interface it offers
great benefits in many application
areas. It provides an easy,
powerful, intuitive way of human-
computer interaction. The user can
watch and manipulate the
simulated environment in the same way
we act in the real world, without any
need to learn how
the complicated (and often clumsy)
user interface works. Therefore many
applications like flight
simulators, architectural walkthrough
or data visualization systems were
developed relatively
fast. Later on, VR has was applied as a
teleoperating and collaborative
medium, and of course
in the entertainment area.
1 . 3 . 2 . Data and architectural
visualization
For a long time people have been
gathering a great amount of various
data. The management of
megabytes or even gigabytes of
information is no easy task. In order to
make the full use of it,
special visualization techniques were
developed. Their goal is to make the
data perceptible and
easily accessible for humans. Desktop
computers equipped with visualization
packages and
simple interface devices are far from
being an optimal solution for data
presentation and
manipulation. Virtual reality promises a
more intuitive way of interaction.
The first attempts to apply VR as a
visualization tool were architectural
walkthrough
systems. The pioneering works in this
field were done at the University of
North Carolina
beginning after year 1986 [Broo86],
with the new system generations
developed
constantly [Broo92b]. Many other
research groups created impressive
applications as well –
just to mention the visualization of St.
Peter Basilica at the Vatican presented
at the Virtual
Reality World’95 congress in Stuttgart
or commercial Virtual Kitchen design
tool. What is so
fantastic about VR to make it superior
to a standard computer graphics? The
feeling of presence
and the sense of space in a virtual
building, which cannot be reached even
by the most realistic
still pictures or animations. One can
watch it and perceive it under different
lighting conditions
just like real facilities. One can even
walk through non-existent houses –
the destroyed ones
(see fig. 1.3.2.1) like e.g., the
Frauenkirche in Dresden, or ones not
even created yet.
Another discipline where VR is also
very useful is scientific visualization.
The navigation
through the huge amount of data
visualized in three-dimensional space is
almost as easy as
walking. An impressive example of
such an application is the Virtual Wind
Tunnel [Brys93f,
Brys93g] developed at the NASA
Ames Research Center. Using this
program the scientists
have the possibility to use a data glove
to input and manipulate the streams of
virtual smoke in
the airflow around a digital model of
an airplane or space-shuttle. Moving
around (using a
BOOM display technology) they can
watch and analyze the dynamic
behavior of airflow and
VIRTUAL REALITY HISTORY,
APPLICATIONS, TECHNOLOGY AND FUTURE
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easily find the areas of instability (see
fig. 1.3.2.2). The advantages of such
a visualization
system are convincing – it is clear that
using this technology, the design
process of complicated
shapes of e.g., an aircraft, does not
require the building of expensive
wooden models any
more. It makes the design phase much
shorter and cheaper. The success of
NASA Ames
encouraged the other companies to
build similar installations – at
Eurographics’95 Volkswagen
in cooperation with the German
Fraunhofer Institute presented a
prototype of a virtual wind
tunnel for exploration of airflow
around car bod

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