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Virtual Reality: Purpose Beyond Gaming
An anonymous reader writes "Virtual reality tech is getting a ton of attention for what it can do to video games. But the technology itself isn't limited to games — just as Kinect was hijacked and used for myriad other purposes, so will VR be broadly adapted. This article goes into some of the applications: 'An elderly woman in a retirement home recently used an Oculus to explore a garden and walk stairs again. This simple environment brought her to tears. Work is also being done to help PTSD sufferers deal with their trauma by replicating the scene within virtual reality and there is great interest in using a similar approach for other conditions like amnesia, Alzheimer's and dementia. ... It's now possible for museum spaces and schools to teleport students to specific moments in history, to allow them to experience being executed by a guillotine, take tours of space or even explore the depths of the ocean.' What other VR uses can you foresee?"
Good thing it mentioned the anecdote about the eldery woman twice, otherwise I might have forgotten it. Clearly no one is proof reading these...
now you can fulfill all your pedophile, nekrophile, sodomy, heterosexual ..... - phantasies without commiting a crime.
this will change masturbation forever.
Can the story be changed to be from the Redundancy of Derpartment Redundancy?
as well as déjà vu.
Something designed for games can be re-purposed for something else? Wow... Next you'll be telling me that new Internet thing with all the porn can also host cat videos.
Flight simulators. Of course, we've been using VR for these for decades, so it's not exactly news..
Those people who think they know everything are a great annoyance to those of us who do. (Isaac Asimov)
Any use of VR is fine, with gaming, medical and tourism being the most amazing from my perspective.
That said, I would hate to see it become predominantly a platform for social networks as Zuckerberg has envisioned. That stuff has the potential to ruin the technology by integrating itself too deeply.
I hope it gets broader adoption than Kinect or those Wii sports novelties.
There have been many sci-fi novels about virtual worlds and their economy, and they inspire a lot of people. I have spoken to people eager to "relocate" into virtual reality with most of their business and even personal life. I guess it's because virtual worlds simplify or ignore many boring details of life.
Even the current, far from perfect, simulations like Second Life, WoW or Lineage have so many fans that it shows the potential for adoption.
If Facebook and other vendors make it right, it can be a smooth continuum of shades of VR, from games, through virtual art galleries, shows and meeting places (like Second Life or Minecraft), and to 3D chat and augmented reality.
And of course porn.
That 2.5 seconds would still more than kill any benefit you get from it. example
are a couple of the more practical, less warm and fuzzy, places where I thought VR would have been employed much sooner.
The USA is only 4X older than me...perspective
is /. editors. Maybe I could go to a virtual world where /. has real editors?
Do you have ESP?
I can imagine great potential for using this in conjunction with the Ludovico Technique
*band if you please*
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Microscopy: put cameras and microphones on a very small physical avatar (say, the size of a Lego minifig). Walk/drive it around in a real miniature environment-- say, a Lego city built on a tabletop, with real people also in the room. Enjoy. Refine. Make something cool. Macroscopy: place cameras and microphones widely spaced apart and high above the ground-- on the side of a skyscraper, a cell tower, or suspended from a blimp. Or on the ISS. Figure out how to incorporate something like looking-around movement to the rig. Pretend to be a giant, or a giant space creature. Have fun.
And you think that would be worse than operating a camera with a joystick and the same lag? Certainly the "reflexes" would have to be autonomous, but give the operator the ability for immersive situational awareness and I bet you they can make better and faster tactical decisions.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
You could create a 5th virtual display to constantly remind you that some words get capitalized and that typing in all lowercase is lazy, and it makes you look bad to your boss and anyone else who reads what you type. Typing in all lowercase is no better than your mom typing everything in all caps.
...just a view of the basket that your head is going to drop into? Maybe there is an option to lay down face up towards the sky.
One word answer: Holodeck.
(...or at the very least, the first baby steps towards such a thing...)