Advantages And Disadvantages Of Virtual Wonderland

2.2 Virtual Reality

The very first idea of VR goes back until 1965, where Ivan Sutherland presented the idea of the ”Ultimate Display”: ”The ultimate display would, of course, be a room within which the computer can control the existence of matter. A chair displayed in such a room would be good enough to sit in. Handcuffs displayed in such a room would be confining, and a bullet displayed in such a room would be fatal. With appropriate programming such a display could literally be the Wonderland into which Alice walked.”[Sut65]. Ivan Sutherland presented a daring vision of a virtual world where people would not only be able to hear and interact with objects but also to smell and taste them. A few years later, he proved his vision right by

[Bis92]

Although, VR is well known these days and a lot of researchers occupy themselves with improving it and getting closer to Sutherlands vision, finding a universally valid definition to describe it with all its possibilities and limitations is quite difficult. As no single

”true” definition can be found, the following definitions were chosen as some representatives to illustrate what points they all have in common and to which characteristics

VR can be narrowed down to.

• ”Virtual reality a medium composed of interactive computer simulations that sense the participant’s position and actions and replace or augment the feedback to one or more senses, giving the feeling of being mentally immersed or present in the simulation (a virtual world).” [She03]

• ”Real-time interactive graphics with three-dimensional models, when combined with a display technology that gives the user immersion in the model world and direct manipulation [...]” [Bis92]

• ”Virtual reality is a high-end user-computer interface that involves real-time simulation and interactions through multiple sensorial channels. These

This element is not part of the taxonomy proposed by Burdea and Coiffet as it can also be counted to intaraction. [Bur03; She03]

2.2.1 The HTC Vive

The HTC Vive is a VR system developed by Valve and takes VR closer to the original idea of Ivan Sutherland as it allows the user to walk around in a predefined play area of maximal 5 m in diagonal and thereby control the movement of his virtual self just by moving in reality. It therefore uses the tracking technology embedded in the headset and the 360 degrees play area coverage integrated into the two base stations which are installed diagonally across the room. The distance of the base stations define the play area, which formes a virtual boundary for the Vive. The headset itself has a OLED display with a resolution of 1080 x 1200 pixels per eye, a refresh rate of 90 Hz and 110 degrees field of view and uses SteamVR Tracking, a G-sensor, a gyroscope and proximity to position the head of the player correctly in virtual space. [HTCnd]

As the headset uses SteamVR Tracking, the whole system can be easily integrated into

Unity just by downloading the SteamVR Plugin from the Unity Asset