VIRTUAL REALITY

                                            VIRTUAL REALITY  

“It began as a high-tech corporate tool. Today Virtual Reality and its offshoot, Augmented Reality, have morphed into handy technologies for lay users – with a growing Indian ecosystem”                                    

                                                                                            

Virtual Reality , also known as immersive Multimedia or computer Enhanced Reality, is an artificial environment created by computers and software that allows the user to interact with it and by harnessing senses like sight, touch and sound (and sometimes, smell!) creates the illusion that it is a real environment.

Interactive   3-D

In its simplest form, VR can be experienced by all of us with no special tools other than a PC or laptop with a mouse. Do a browser search for “Interactive 3-D” and you will find hundreds of images where you can zoom in and out and move 360 degrees around the object in the picture by manipulating the mouse. You will find sites that sell cars or apartments, increasingly offering such ‘walk-through’ imagery for potential customers. All leading online real estate marketers – CommonFloor.com, Housing.com, and IndiaProverty.com – have launched mobile apps that harness technologies like 3-D and VR to let you look before you leap: immerse yourself in virtual realizations of the fully constructed property, before leaping for your cheque book.

            In fact, adding a third dimension to a flat image has long been the best way to give the illusion that ‘you are there’ in the 1950s, parents in India could buy small viewing plastic devices for their children called view-master – with sets  of circular cardboard – backed image disks. These were essential Kodachrome transparencies shot with a stereoscopic camera and related to one theme – like wonders of the world, wild life, etc. Seen through the view-master, the pair of images gives the illusion of 3-D. Larger desi versions of the stereoscopic viewer were a constant and popular feature of fairs and jathras all over India for decades. The second, more people-centered, avatar of VR occurred in the last 3-4 years, on the back of a few other immersive technologies.