Informatics Practices · Ch 2 — Emerging Trends
Immersive Experiences
Immersive Experiences
Watching a film in three-dimensional (3D) videography has raised the joy of the theatre experience to a new level, and video games are being developed with the same ambition — to pull the player inside the action. These are immersive experiences: experiences that allow us to visualise, feel and react by stimulating our senses. By engaging the senses directly, they enhance our interaction and involvement, making the experience more realistic and engaging than a flat screen ever could.
Immersion is not only for entertainment. It has proved its worth in the field of training, where practising in the real world would be costly or dangerous — driving simulators (shown in Figure 2.2), flight simulators and similar systems let learners build skill inside a convincing artificial environment.
Immersive experience can be achieved using two technologies: virtual reality and augmented reality.
(A) Virtual Reality (VR)
Everything we experience as "reality" reaches us through our senses. From this comes a powerful idea: if we can present our senses with made-up or non-real information, our perception of reality will alter in response to it. Virtual Reality is built on exactly that principle.
Virtual Reality is a three-dimensional, computer-generated situation that simulates the real world. The user does not merely watch it — the user gets immersed in the environment, interacting with and exploring it, engaging with its objects and with the outcomes of the user's own actions.
Key points about how VR works today:
- At present, immersion is achieved with the help of VR headsets.
- To make the experience more realistic, VR supplies other sensory information as well — sound, smell, motion, temperature and so on — not just visuals.
- It is a comparatively new field.
Its applications already span gaming (Figure 2.3 shows a VR headset), military training, medical procedures, entertainment, social science and psychology, engineering, and other areas where a simulation is needed for better understanding and learning.
(B) Augmented Reality (AR)
Where VR replaces your surroundings, AR enriches them. Augmented Reality is the superimposition of computer-generated perceptual information over the existing physical surroundings. It adds components of the digital world to the physical world, along with the associated tactile and other sensory requirements, thereby making the environment interactive and digitally manipulable.
The everyday face of AR is location-based:
- Users can access information about the nearest places with reference to their current location.
- They can get information about places and choose among them on the basis of user reviews. …
Figure 2.2, captioned Driving Simulator, is a photograph of a man seated inside a driving-simulator rig. The rig is a physical cockpit fitted with a steering wheel, and the driver faces three large panoramic screens arranged in front of him. Together the screens display a simulated road scene, wrapping the view around the driver much as a real windscreen and side windows would.
The setup illustrates the core idea of an immersive experience: the learner's senses are fed convincing artificial information. His hands grip an actual wheel, his eyes see a road stretching across a wide field of view, and his body sits in a cockpit — so his perception and reactions approach those of real driving even though no vehicle is moving anywhere. …
Figure 2.3, captioned VR Headset, is a photograph of a man wearing a black virtual-reality headset. The device sits strapped over his face and fully covers his eyes, so that nothing of the real surroundings reaches his vision — everything he sees is supplied from inside the headset.
That complete covering of the eyes is the whole point, and it connects directly to what the section teaches about Virtual Reality. VR works by presenting the senses with made-up, non-real information so that the user's perception of reality alters in response. By sealing off the real view and substituting a three-dimensional, computer-generated environment, the headset immerses the wearer inside a simulated world that can be explored and interacted with. …
The photograph captures augmented reality exactly the way a user meets it in daily life. A hand holds a smartphone inside a shopping mall, and the phone's screen shows the live camera view of the mall concourse stretching out in front of the user. Superimposed on that live view are information labels — computer-generated annotations that the AR app has placed over the real scene the camera is looking at that very moment.
The image is best read in two layers. The first layer is the physical world itself: the mall concourse, which exists and looks the same whether or not the phone is there. The second layer is the computer-generated perceptual information that the app draws on top of the camera feed. Nothing in the mall has been replaced or redrawn; the phone has simply augmented what the eye sees through it with extra, digitally supplied detail. That is the essence of Augmented Reality — the superimposition of computer-generated perceptual information over the existing physical surroundings, making the environment interactive and digitally manipulable. …