What are the advantages and disadvantages of Virtual Reality?

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Ricardo Pacheco   IBS

ITGS Portfolio 1

26/12/01

St. Julians School

What are the advantages and disadvantages of Virtual Reality?

Criterion A: Describing the Issue

Douglas Adams concluded in  Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy that “There are those who think that VR may be the most important development since man first chipped flint, and there are those who don’t know what it is yet”.(2)

We can say that VR is one of the most topics talked and discussed in our early days. First, we can call it a form of technology and there are many ways we can use it. New uses are constantly being found for VR. There are main impacts that we can refer to such as in interactive entertainment, advanced car simulators, systems that let doctors practice “Virtual Surgery” and also in architecture and education. Various types of interface devices allow us to have the illusory experiences of seeing, touching, picking up, and even manipulating Virtual Objects. These devices transmit the sight, sounds, and feel of simulated worlds to the user. (1)

At the stage of social context there are a lot of positive impacts, but nevertheless there are also negative points. The advantages and disadvantages of new technologies are never distributed evenly among the population. This means that every new technology benefits some and harms others. Some years ago, even the people who believed that it might one day be possible to use computers for some more widely and useful than processing payrolls and crunching scientific calculations, it was unthinkable to them the dimension that VR would reach these days. (1,3,4)

As Dorling Kindersley says in Multimedia the Complete Guide “We still don’t know how the Revolutionary Technology of Computer-Generated Artificial Worlds promises to transform society”. (1)

 

Criterion B: IT Background of the Issue

Introduction VR’s origins can be traced back to the late 1960’s when Ivan Sutherland produced the first head mounted display system. VR may seem like a new technology, but it is descended from the flight simulators that have been used by the military for over 40 years. The biggest boost to its development came from NASA, which in mid-eighties created the Virtual Interface Environment Workstation for planning missions into space. (2)

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1.Multimedia the Complete Guide by Dorling Kindersley – Page 104

2.Computer Confluence by George Beekman

3. Knight.city.ba.k12.md.US/ib/PFPtopics.htm

4. Education.qut.edu.au/lloydm/MDB300/postman.html

As a result, research into VR dramatically increased. And so it was that on 7th June 1989, the Computer Aided Design Company Auto disk and the Eclectic Computer Company V.P.L. announced a new technology to the world called VR. The impact of society is big and have made a lot of changes. For many years’ people thought VR would only run on expensive workstations. However, with the increase in power of personal computer, it is now possible to experience VR technology ...

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