Virtual reality is a computer technology that immerses a user in an imagined or

replicated world (like video games, movies, or flight simulation), or simulates

presence in the real world (like gliding through the canals on a gondola in Venice,
or attending a Grammy Awards ceremony). The user experiences VR through a headset,
sometimes in combination with physical spaces or multi-projected environments, and
is able to interact with the virtual world in real time. A fully immersive VR
experience can provide synthetic stimuli to multiple physical senses of the user.
The most common sensory displays in VR are visual, aural, haptic, and vestibular
(balance).
In short, VR is a medium that puts you inside of the media. When VR is done well,
your brain is going to treat that as if it were a real experience. It feels like
you’re actually doing something. The following short video is a good introduction
to VR, and will answer your most basic questions:
Source:
CNET
Key VR concepts
Four key elements of VR experience
The key elements of experiencing VR — and differentiate it from other media — are a
virtual world, immersion, sensory feedback (responding to user input), and
interactivity.
Virtual world
A virtual world is a three-dimensional environment generated by a computer in which
one can interact with others and create objects as part of that interaction.
Immersion
In the medium of VR, the term “immersion” refers to both physical and mental
sensation of being in an environment. In discussions of most media, “being
immersed” generally refers to an emotional or mental state — a feeling of being
involved in the experience. In the medium of VR, however, physical immersion is
also the property of a VR system because participants physically interact with the
virtual environment.
Physical immersion is a defining characteristic of virtual reality.
Sensory feedback
In VR, participants are provided with direct sensory feedback based on their
physical positions and activities in the virtual world. A virtual display, for
example, responds to a participant moving his or her head by updating the displayed
image accordingly.
The difference between VR and other media is that in VR, we experience first-hand
an imagined reality with many of our physical senses. These sensory feedbacks give
participants the ability to observe the results of their activities in the medium.
In other media such as movies, novels, radio, we experience perceived reality
second-hand through imagining ourselves within the world presented through the
medium.
In other words, VR is a medium that allows us to have a simulated experience of the
physical reality. Because of this, VR allows us to purposefully reduce the danger
of physical reality and to more safely create scenarios that are not possible in
the real world.
Interactivity
For VR to seem authentic, it should be interactive in responding to users’ action
in the virtual world. If the virtual environment responds to a user’s action in a
natural manner, the sense of immersion will remain. If the virtual environment
cannot respond quickly enough, the human brain will rapidly notice and the sense of
immersion will diminish.
Source: Oculus
“What you see in the painting is a window into someone’s artistic interpretation of
the world. In VR, you don’t see that person’s point of view through a window.
You’re inside of it.” — Saschka Unseld, Director — Dear Angelica, Creative Director
— Oculus Story Studio
Other key concepts: Telepresence
Telepresence is an application that uses VR technology to virtually place the user
somewhere else in space. The user is able to see and hear with the aid of remote
sensing devices in a remote location from the first person point of view. They are
able to interact and affect the remote environment by their actions.
Example:
Source: Jaunt VR
In partnership with Jaunt, a cinematic VR content company, Paul McCartney released
a 360-degree concert recording through a virtual reality app, which provides a VR
experience where users felt like they were on stage with the rock star.
Collaborative environment
A collaborative VR environment refers to multiple users interacting within the same
virtual space or simulation. Users can perceive and interact with one another
within the simulation. The users’ representation is referred to as their avatar.
The simulated world runs on several computers that are connected over the network.
This allows users from different locations to participate in the same VR experience
together.
Example:
Source: Road to VR
The big screen is a social virtual desktop app that allows users to use their
computer in VR. Users can work, play, hang out, and collaborate in virtual
environments.
Types of the problem that can benefit from VR
In general, VR is an especially suitable medium for problems that require
manipulation of objects in a three-dimensional environment. Besides, one also can
fully take advantages of its telepresence and virtual collaboration features to
create more benefits for the application, if applicable. The following list is not
meant to be exhaustive of the types of problem that VR can solve.
Immersive 3D presentation VR is suitable in scenarios in which an immersive 3D
presentation or a 3D visualization of an object is more persuasive than a one- or
two-dimensional format, such as in the cases of architectural walkthroughs, design
spaces, virtual prototyping, scientific visualization, teaching and learning a
subject in 3D.
Example:
Source: Tech Crunch
Insite VR allows architects to transform designs from major modeling software into
three-dimensional VR environments, which they can then view in a life-like 3D image
using certain VR headsets. This gives the architects a chance to “walk through” a
design, as it were, and see how it would look when completed, so they can make
changes. Insite VR also allows multiple VR users from remote locations to explore
content together and collaborate virtually.
Exploration VR is a suitable delivery mechanism if the goal is to explore or
familiarize oneself with a specific environment (either real or fictitious). Image
any art student in Vietnam (my home country), or anywhere in the world, can have
the opportunity to visit the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, or the Louvre
Museum in Paris, by just putting a VR headset on. How fascinating is that! On the
commercial side, VR can be an effective marketing and sales tool for the
hospitality, tourism and real estate industries. A VR presentation or experience
can provide customers a personalized and detailed tour of the resort, hotel, or an
individual suite, which adds to the sense of customers being there and can have
positive impacts on sales conversion.
Example:
Source: Matterport
Through a collaboration with VR firm Matterport, the New York Times now offers
virtual reality tours of some of its luxury real estate listings.
Simulation Types of problems that can benefit from simulations in VR: Problems that
cannot be tackled in the physical world (e.g., witnessing the formation of the
Earth)Problems that cannot be studied safely (e.g., witnessing an
earthquake)Problems that require extensive practice to avoid costly mistakes in
real life (e.g., football training, surgical practice)Problems that cannot be
deployed due to cost constraints (e.g., car dealership showroom)Problems in “What
if?” studies (where virtual exploration could lead to a better understanding).
Examples:
Source: Pious Startup
Pious uses VR for exposure therapy to overcome phobias. The VR platform provides
mental health professionals with animated and live environments for exposure
therapy while maintaining a safe and secure office environment. The therapists are
able to get a real-time look at what their patient is seeing and adjust the
experience as needed even during a session to ensure optimized results that meet
the needs of each individual patient.
Source: STRIVE
Another example is STRIVE, which was born out of Stanford University’s Virtual
Human Interaction Lab. STRIVE is a pioneer in VR training and has been used by many
professional and college football teams to train athletes through VR experiences.
An evaluation study of the effectiveness of VR training shows that STRIVE training
led to a 30% point increase in recall of topics, from 70% to 100%.
Live & Real-life events
With its telepresence property, VR can be utilized for streaming of live events
(e.g., fashion shows, music concerts, sports events, industry conferences, and
world affairs). Watching an event in VR makes a user feel like they’re physically
attending the event with the best seat in the house. This helps solve the problem
of limited seating at events and makes events essentially available to anyone and
anywhere.
Example: Source: Upload
VRCNN partnered with NextVR, the leader in broadcasting live sports events and
concerts in VR, to stream the first 2016 US Democratic presidential debate in VR
which was watched across 121 countries. NextVR also has partnered with leaders in
sports and entertainment, including the NBA, FOX Sports, Live Nation, International
Champions Cup, to deliver live events in VR to fans globally.
Social platforms & Virtual collaboration
In VR, people come together in a shared virtual environment and have natural
conversations much as they would face-to-face. They are also able to interact in
real-time with 3D items besides 2D objects such as PDF, PowerPoint documents. This
allows remote individuals and groups to communicate ideas with each other more
effectively and have more personal touch than traditional methods such as video
conference, phone call, and traditional social media. On the consumer application
side, besides Bigscreen — mentioned earlier in this post — examples of other social
platforms for shared user experiences in VR include Against Gravity’s Rec Room,
AltspaceVR, and Facebook Spaces.
Source: LiveLike
LiveLike, an on-demand sports VR media content platform, now allows you to watch
sports with your Facebook friends in VR with customizable avatars and spatialized
audio. On the professional application side, WorldViz’s Schofield, currently in
Beta, provides corporations with an immersive communication method in VR that
allows effective collaboration between remote individuals and groups.
Source: uploader
EmpathyVR affects people on an emotional level much more than any other media.
Because of its immersive properties, VR can give them not just a better sense of
the places but also more empathy and a deeper emotional connection to the people
that were actually there. It is a powerful tool for visual storytelling and
simulation experiences to connect human beings to other human beings and to spread
awareness and inspire action on pressing social issues, such as in the journalism,
nonprofit and environmental industries.
Source: Adweek
For example, in order to raise awareness of Syrian refugees’ struggles, United
Nation partnered with VR firm Within (formerly VRSE) to produce Clouds Over Sidra.
It is a VR film that features a twelve-year-old in the Za’atari camp in Jordan,
home to 130,000 Syrians fleeing violence and war, and children make up half the
camp’s population. Viewers are taken closer to the situation than a standard screen
could ever convey, joining refugee children in their activities at school and
families throughout the day. Results: A 2015 fundraising conference where Clouds
Over Sidra was shown ended up raising $3.8 billion, over 70 percent more than
projected. A UNICEF study shows that one in six people made donations after
watching the video, which is twice the normal rate of giving.
Source: The Washington Post
Another example is the homeless project at Stanford University’s Virtual Human
Interaction Lab. To cultivate empathy, a VR experiment was designed to have
participants simulate being homeless and riding a bus. In fact, it was the Empathy
element that first drove me to learn more about the potentials of VR. I hope you
enjoyed this post and gained a basic understanding of what VR is and its benefits.
I welcome any feedback or comments and look forward to connecting with people who
share my passion for VR/AR. My another simple hope is that after reading this post,
some of you who have never put on a VR headset will at least google “where to try
VR headsets.” If you are in the New York area, you can try Samsung Gear VR for free
at Samsung 837. You also can pay a fee to try different VR headsets and VR
experiences at Jump Into the Light and VR World. Or check out Ghostbusters at
Madame Tussaud’s Wax Museum for a hyper-immersive VR experience.For thousands and
thousands of years, approximately 10,500, humans have been selectively breeding
animals. This process works by picking the most favorable member of a species and
allowing it to breed, passing on its genes, which over time causes these genes or
features to be displayed in extreme ways to increase output, efficiency or
something else that makes the crop or animal more beneficial to farm. Of course,
humans did not realise this was what we were doing and only more recently
discovered the biological mechanisms behind this effect, which we dubbed artificial
selection. A fantastic example of this would be the dairy cow, an animal we have
been selectively breeding for roughly ten and a half thousand years, by choosing
the cows that where the largest or produced the most milk to have offspring we
unconsciously increased the efficiency at which they make milk, altered their
biology to have more meat on it and domesticated it to either tolerate or enjoy
human contact all for the sake of food production. Of course this does have effects
that go beyond just the dairy cow and has had wider impacts on the environment and
ecosystem.
Selective breeding cows originated in farmers catching and breeding a species known
as the Auroch – which has been extinct for almost 400 years – and likely the first
thing they were used for was meat rather than their milk at the time. Because of
this it is likely only the calmest where actually farmable and tameable, as such
those were the ones who actually had the offspring, passing on the more
domesticated genes that made it easier for the farmers to work with and breed them
thus passing on the genes of the calmer ones more often. This means that only those
most suitable to either the environment they were farmed in or for the framers
intended purpose in breeding them got to pass on their genes meaning the gene pool
of the next generation will as such have a higher frequency of these preferred
genes and make farming easier and more efficient as time passes. By no means is
this a perfect system, as breeding a cow that has a few genes that you find
favorable will always pass on those genes due to the randomness of the process of
meiosis as well as the chance for mutation and hidden genes being present. Even
though the traits it displays (its phenotype) may be favorable its genes (genotype)
may not be. For example, if the parent with the favorable genotype was heterozygous
with an unfavourable recessive gene and is bred with another individual that is
also heterozygous with that unfavourable gene, there is a real chance its offspring
will be homozygous for that recessive gene, meaning the phenotype you wanted from
the original animal is not expressed. Examples in cows include genetic diseases
like dwarfism or crooked tail syndrome, but really this process applies to any
small inconvenience like maybe it does not breed as well or does not produce as
much or as nutritious milk.
As time went on breeding for select traits became much easier to do on purpose as
the traits you want as people discovered ways to find out an animal’s genotype.
With this knowledge dairy and cattle farmers can breed two individuals that present
a gene, either homozygous dominant or homozygous recessive, to guarantee that the
offspring produced is “purebred” for that specific trait. The first way to discover
an animal’s genotype used would be a test cross, which is where you cross one
organism that expresses a trait with one you know is heterozygous and looking at
the resulting offspring you can determine whether the first parent is dominant or
heterozygous for the trait you want. Other, more recent methods include marker
assisted selection or “MAS” which is used to mark a specific gene, usually one
that’s difficult to measure/ observe, passed on very rarely (recessive) or aren’t
expressed until later in life, in order to indirectly select for a genetic
determinant of a trait of interest citation. The reason MAS is a more recent
technique in selective breeding because very few traits in general have markers and
it was first observed naturally – allegedly – in 1923 by a man named Sax K. when he
observed an “association of a simply inherited genetic marker with a quantitative
trait in plants when he observed segregation of seed size associated with
segregation for a seed coat color marker in beans” Quote source. The steps for
effectively using MAS include mapping the gene in questions location or
“quantitative trait locus” (a.k.a QTL) by using various methods and then using this
information for marker assisted selection, and linked or very close genes in the
animals DNA are used to mark the desired traits presence. It is still possible for
crossing over to occur between those two linked or very close genes so usually two
or more markers are used to indicate its presence and reduce the margin of error
for homologous recombination.
Since man first began domesticating the cow, its genetic diversity has decreased do
to us breeding all the genes we didn’t want or need out of the species over time as
a byproduct. Another biological implication is that, for the same reasons MAS
works, breeding a gene out may be very difficult or impossible due to linked or
very close genes. Linked genes are those found very close together on the same
chromosome and have a recombination frequency of less than 50%, an example of this
in cows might be milk and fat production Citation. A farmer may select a cow that
is large, muscular or produces a lot of milk but those genes could also come with a
negative side effect like fertility or immune system problems, which would likely
outweigh the benefits of selecting for that gene. This is because they would either
all die from the same disease due to their lack of variation, which may negatively,
or positively, affect the ecosystem in some big way if all cows were wiped out
suddenly.
Cloning is also a more recent technique that would allow for the selection of
specific individuals in order to preserve a specific genotype that the farmer finds
very efficient or convenient without having to go through the risk/ reward system
of breeding them normally and would as such have a higher success rate as the
scientists involved are in complete control of the process. Additionally it is
fairly easy to add extra genes to the species or individual that they may not
naturally possess, an example being cows that can donate their plasma to humans
Citation. This technique is called transgenesis, where genes from one species are
placed into the genome of another species or the use of gene editing through
various other means Citation. The reason for these cows is a lack of blood donors
to provide plasma to critically injured patients, and because the farmer does not
use the cow’s blood for anything as it is, it’s something of an extra product they
can sell or give away. This works by inserting the gene responsible for making
plasma for humans and replacing it with the one the cow uses, preferably the plasma
gene from a type AB person as that would make then a universal plasma donor, which
allows the cow to make “human” plasma which it can donate to humans without any
negative impact on the cows lifespan or the farmer but with a large impact for
patients suffering heavy blood loss and trauma throughout all the hospitals around
the world as well as helping populations fight disease Citation. To make these cows
scientists take the ABO gene from humans that is responsible for plasma generation
and type in the humans body and replace it with the equivalent gene in a cow cell
which is then inserted into an “empty” embryo and electrocuted, a very similar
process to cloning just with the added transgenesis or gene editing. Depending on
what gene is transferred and the individual performing the procedure as well as
what type of donor cell is used (options include bone marrow and blood cells) the
success rate tends to be around 5% or less, and if it does succeed there is no
guarantee the individual is viable and can reproduce to pass on those genes
CItation. If and when it does succeed however, because the individual possessed
those genes from birth or rather from the original cell it was produced from, it
can pass on those genes to its offspring meaning the process does not have to be
repeated if you want to keep that specific gene for such a wide use like plasma
generation, which is what makes the <5% success rate and costs worth it in the long
run in my opinion, especially since gene editing techniques like CRISPR-Cas9 are
making the process of transgenesis cheaper and simpler than ever before. We use
this technology because humans have an ever increasing population and despite
increasing medical science we still need plasma donation to help fight disease and
heal trauma patients which would allow for better survival of the human species.
A biological implication of this is that one day these gene edited cows might end
up out-breeding normal cows, not because they are better at anything in particular
but because humans are artificially selecting for them out of convenience. Another
implication may be that we only breed donor gene cows with other donor gene cows in
order to make sure they are “purebred” for that gene in particular and because we
have already been selectively breeding cows for thousands of years and because it
is unlikely we will decide to make a plasma donating clone of ever cow, the cows
gene pool will be even further reduced which means that ironically while they are
helping us fight disease they will be more susceptible to be wiped out by a single
disease themselves. Additionally as not much research has been done into the long
term effects that changing the plasma of these cows causes it may affect another
species like bacteria that’s meant to be in the cow’s blood and digestive system,
or blood sucking parasites that target cows which may influence how other species
in the chain survive and interact with each other, not just the cow.
For a species to survive long-term it must have variation in its gene pool or high
genetic diversity otherwise they will all fail equally at adapting to a new
situation or surviving a new pathogen. Because of this, despite the many advantages
of selective breeding and gene editing cows there are for humans the cows
themselves may suffer from it and put the whole species at risk. WIth selective
breeding there is no return for a species like the cow that has been artificially
selected by humans for so many thousands of years, however with transgenesis the
original unedited animal will exist for at least a good long while before the gene
edited one either replaces it or outnumbers it, so if the edited version of the
species does end up in trouble the original species may be fine or vica versa and
can be bred with each other to increase diversity to some degree. If a species is
made so specialised by gene editing however and after so many years there may
either be no original species to breed them with due to them being obsolete, as
cows cannot survive without humans realistically, or have become so genetically
different from the original species they can no longer produce offspring in a dire
situation which may have further knock-on effects to the ecosystem and food chain
due to such a small amount of genetic variation of the species. This could result
in extinction or something very close, or a shortage of food as well as, in this
case, a source of plasma and possibly other unforeseen effects on the environment
and other species.Remember: This is just a sample from a fellow student.