Virtual Reality

Virtual Reality means roughly “virtual reality” in German. What is meant is an environment that a computer calculates entirely and that you don’t watch on a television but rather experience all around you. To do this, you put on a headset that has two small screens directly in front of your eyes. If you turn your head to the left, the displayed world turns along with it – as if you were really looking around. The brain then perceives this environment for a short time as a real space, even though it consists only of computed results. It is precisely this feeling of being right in the middle of it that distinguishes Virtual Reality from a normal video game or a film.

From Toy to Work Environment

For a long time, VR was regarded mainly as an expensive toy for video games. Meanwhile, the technology is being used wherever practicing in the real world would be dangerous, expensive, or impossible. Pilots train for emergencies in simulators without any risk of an airplane actually crashing. Medical students practice surgical steps before working on real patients. Firefighters and industrial workers also rehearse procedures in this way that leave no room for error in a real emergency.

Economically, VR is interesting because large corporations hope for a new market. Meta, Apple, Sony, and Valve invest billions of dollars annually in headsets and software. So far, success has been mixed: the devices often cost several hundred to several thousand dollars, and many buyers set them aside after a few weeks. In stock market reports, VR therefore regularly appears as an example of a technology whose breakthrough keeps being postponed.

A second reason for the attention is its proximity to artificial intelligence. Building virtual worlds by hand is expensive because every object has to be modeled individually. AI systems can now partially generate such spaces, characters, and voices themselves. Only this makes it realistic that VR content could be created in large quantities.

Two Images, Sixty Times per Second

The spatial impression is created through a simple trick. The headset shows each eye a slightly shifted image of the same scene, just as our two eyes do in reality. The brain combines these two views into a single three-dimensional image. This makes an object appear sometimes near, sometimes far away, even though both images are flat.

The second building block is so-called tracking, meaning the constant measurement of head position. Sensors and cameras in the headset detect where you are looking and where you are moving. The computer then recalculates the scene from the new viewing direction. For this to be convincing, the image must be updated at least about 90 times per second. If it takes longer, the display lags behind the movement, and many users feel sick – similar to seasickness.

It is important to distinguish this from Augmented Reality, or AR for short. There, the real environment remains visible, and the computer only overlays additional information, such as an arrow on the sidewalk. Virtual Reality, by contrast, replaces the entire field of view. Hybrid forms, in which cameras transmit the real environment into the headset, fall under the umbrella term Mixed Reality.

VR in the Living Room, in the Museum, and in the Workplace

Today, VR is encountered most often in video games. Popular titles let players hit balls, climb, or float around a space station. In addition, museums use the technology for tours through destroyed buildings or ancient cities. Virtual concerts and sports broadcasts from the perspective of the playing field also already exist.

In companies, VR is mainly used for training and planning. Car manufacturers view new models at full size before a single piece of sheet metal has been manufactured. Logistics companies train employees in a warehouse that hasn’t even been built yet. Such applications are unspectacular but are the more stable part of the market economically.

In the news, the term often comes up in connection with the “metaverse,” the idea of permanently inhabited virtual worlds. A common misconception is to equate the two terms. Virtual Reality is merely a display technology, whereas the metaverse is a vision of how people are supposed to use these worlds. Whether this vision will catch on remains open – the headsets themselves function independently of it.