vol.1 Virtual Magazine issue2 | Page 26

up to the Moon or down to the seabed—but it's not interactive in any sense.

3.Computer-generated: Why is that important? Because only powerful machines, with realistic 3D computer graphics, are fast enough to make believable, interactive, alternative worlds that change in real-time as we move around them.

4.Explorable: A VR world needs to be big and detailed enough for you to explore. However realistic a painting is, it shows only one scene, from one perspective. A book can describe a vast and complex "virtual world," but you can only really explore it in a linear way, exactly as the author describes it.

5.Immersive: To be both believable and interactive, VR needs to engage both your body and your mind. Paintings by war artists can give us glimpses of conflict, but they can never fully convey the sight, sound, smell, taste, and feel of battle. You can play a flight simulator game on your home PC and be lost in a very realistic, interactive experience for hours (the landscape will constantly change as your plane flies through it), but it's not like using a real flight simulator (where you sit in a hydraulically operated mockup of a real cockpit and feel actual forces as it tips and tilts), and even less like flying a plane.

"Virtual reality" has often been used as a marketing buzzword for compelling, interactive video games or even 3D movies and television programs, none of which really count as VR because they don't immerse you either fully or partially in a virtual world. Search for "virtual reality" in your cellphone app store and you'll find hundreds of hits, even though a tiny cellphone screen could never get anywhere near producing the convincing experience of VR. Nevertheless, things like interactive games and computer simulations would certainly meet parts of our definition up above, so there's clearly more than one approach to building virtual worlds—and more than one flavor of virtual reality.

Personally I don't know much about Virtual Reality, neither am I a computer scientist or a hardware enginner. All those sounds Greek to me. My time in Second Life and a short research I did about Virtual Reality (VR), gave me the option to become an observer for our society's embrace of technological advancement. It is not long ago (couple of decades perhaps) that all this technology would have sound an "out of the blue" concept. Nowdays VR is not something new, definitely we are very familiar with it, awaiting to see what future might bring. The questions is: how comfortable are we really with tech’s next logical step: an integration into the very fabric of our observable reality.