Put on the Virtual Reality Headset: You’re on a dark city street below glittering skyscrapers. Look down and there’s your body, your robotic hands and metallic feet. Look up and there’s a neon pink enemy charging at you. You strike first, your real hands transformed into virtual weapons. The enemy robot goes down in a flare of light.
Take off the Headset: You’re sitting on the couch in the living room :( . Sunlight pours in through the window.
For decades, this kind of fully immersive experience has been the promise of virtual reality gaming. Instead of watching stories play out, you can live them. Since the term was coined in the 1980s, VR has been used to train pilots, assist doctors and help patients with PTSD, and the number of applications just keeps growing.
As investors poured hundreds of millions of dollars into VR, Facebook put its own cash into funding games in the hopes that better experiences might attract people to buy the gear.
“When you play a regular PC game you’re driving [the character] around,” Scott Matalon says. “Even when you’re in first person, it’s still on your PC screen. You look around, and there’s your roommate eating crackers. [But] when you put on that headset you’re completely immersed in a world … you can be anywhere.”
The Future of Virtual Reality
- Virtual reality can help car engineers and designers to effectively visualize the model they’re building without having to use any physical materials. The technology allows for virtual prototypes and high-tech simulations of how a car would function under real-life conditions.
- A recent study showed that VR can, surprisingly, ease severe chronic pain in patients. The pain levels of 120 hospitalized patients were recorded as part of the study. Half of these patients were selected at random to use virtual reality headsets, for set periods – six times over the course of two days — the other half was used as a control group. Incredibly, the study showed that VR is very effective at alleviating pain and that the worse pain a patient is in, the more effective VR is. As one of the researchers on the project said, virtual reality “nips signals in the bud at their origin, blocking pain from reaching the brain.”
- Virtual reality is one of the many technologies to revolutionize healthcare. As LiveScience points out, virtual reality allows surgeons to practice difficult surgical procedures ahead of time. These precise medical procedures can be the difference between life and death and it is incredibly important for a surgeon to have a way to visualize, practice and hone their abilities. Much in the same way, the U.S. military uses VR to help soldiers train for their life or death situations. It uses virtual combat simulations that are not too dissimilar from popular videogames to train soldiers for real-life combat procedures.
And the list goes on and on..
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