虚拟现实技术的英文文献综述

Virtual Reality and its prospect

No matter you are a video game player, a movie lover or an industrial designer, you must have learned a lot about the VR (virtual reality). Many media reports 2016 as the first year of VR. At present, the Steam VR platform has been able to experience the virtual reality game through Vive HTC. Google has invested $0.54 billion in the virtual reality company Magic Leap. It is said that Apple and Facebook also formed a large team composed of virtual reality and augmented reality experts to compete with the other companies in this new, high tech field[2]. Even famous director Spielberg declared that he would produce a film about family cooperating with VRC company. VR (virtual reality) technology can be widely used in urban planning, interior design, industrial simulation, monuments restoration, road and bridge design, real estate sales, tourism, education, water conservancy and electric power, geological disasters, education and training and many other fields, to provide feasible solutions[2]. And the video game is the most eagerly awaited application now. Not long ago, a video game company, Valve, released a promotional video of its VR: Steam VR. In this footage, players are invited to wear VR equipment and experience all kinds of games, and other people can see their experience in "another world" in a variety of events on the screen. Everyone no matter player or viewer say it’s really awesome.

So what is VR? How does it work? Virtual reality, multi-media and network technology are known as the three computer technology with best major prospects. This technology is the use of computer simulation to generate a three-dimensional virtual world, to provide users with visual, auditory, tactile and other simulation, so that users can be in an immersive unlimited observation of things within three dimensional space[3]. When the user moves the position, the computer carries on the complex computation, maintaining the spot feeling. In a word, VR technology can bring the user's perception into the virtual world it creates, and let users believe that it is true.

In general, a normal VR equipment consists of one helmet which have a micro processer and a special optic system to produce parallax and make the stereoscopic there dimensional pictures, two handles for operating and getting sensation like touching and two speakers to produce the three dimensional sounds. And it also needs to connect to a computer which deals with the information, runs program and help the CPU and special optic system produce scene.

It’s really obvious that the most important thing for VR equipment is to make the virtuality like reality. The following are several key technologies to achieve that[4].