Reality Of Virtual Reality

The realm of Virtual reality has gained significant popularity over the last few decades as a topic of research, a technological tool and as a source of entertainment. Technological developments over the last few decades have enhanced the realism of the virtual world for its audience. The constant advancement in the virtual world has raised its importance and utility in the lives of people across the world. This has led to the generation of multiple questions and theories about the extent of reality of these virtual worlds. The attempt is to acquire concrete answers on whether a virtual reality experience can ever possess the level of realism of the actual physical reality for the audience or will people always be aware of the fact that virtual

It is now possible to enter a virtual world with 360 degrees visual access and one can also interact with as well as get tactile response back from the virtual world that they are in (Andres and Gulliver, 2011). By modeling a VR experience on the kind of semiotic world of Second Life coupled with the constant improvements in technology, it may be assumed that one can come to an even closer reality. The proximity of virtual reality with one’s authentic physical reality is further amplified when Peirce’s semiotic theory is applied to the realm of virtual reality in learning and classrooms. Skagestad (1999) provides qualitative evidence to show how Peirce’s understandings of semiotics can be used to determine the effectiveness of virtual technologies in re-creating classrooms. Since Peirce’s conception of learning is based on cognition and not consciousness, the existence of signs and their manipulation (in virtual reality) is given importance. A similar study was conducted by Nason and Yeh (2004) who developed VRMath, a virtual reality technology to help in the learning of mathematics based on the assumptions of the semiotic theory. VRMath has been developed on the semiotic understanding of virtual worlds which show that when a person is able to understand the signs in a virtual reality experience and

A person within virtual reality knows he is in a room with the Vr-headset but still acts and reacts upon the virtual world like it is real (Sanchez, 2005). According to Jonathan Steuer (1993) immersiveness in combination with interactivity affects the telepresence of a person when he uses any hardware. Within Virtual Reality both immersion and interactivity are higher than with other hardwares such as print, telephone and television because the immersion is perceived by the audience to be of a higher quality (Steuer, 1993). According to these theories one could say that the presence would seem so real that the mediating technologies become obscure. When the semiotic theoretical framework is applied to virtual reality, the realism of the virtual reality experience can either be amplified through the encoding process as mentioned above or it could be applied to deconstruct the virtual world through the decoding process. According to Peirce, in the encoding process the user moves from the object to the sign whereas in the decoding process the user moves from the sign to the object (Brill and Tejera, 1988). In a virtual reality experience encoding implies that when faced with a representative symbol in the virtual world, the user draws first from