3D Virtual Reality
The term has become so familiar now,
and while it may not be the “buzz-word” it used to be Virtual
Reality still a rapidly growing technology.
Computer 3D
is the basis for it all now. Scenes, objects, effects,
sounds and everything else the viewer sees or hears are
created piece by piece, coloured “textured”, animated and
then rendered.
Virtual Reality started back in the 1980s
with some very simplistic scenes. These had very little
resemblance to what we would consider as “reality” but
they were still impressive in that they could represent
perspective, distance and shapes. Today the quality has
improved to a level of near perfection although now there
is a bottleneck in the presentation.
Near perfect real
time Virtual Reality requires massive amounts of human
work and computing power to produce, not just in the studios
but also in the actual presentation. The closer we want
the scenes to be to reality the more computing power is
required. There are many solutions now for real time playback
on affordable hardware but still there are limitations
in quality and the work to create them is considerably
more than that required for linear presentations. The use
of the interfaces for these presentations also exceeds
the ability or patience of most people.
Archiform 3D has
a solution called Meander that solves the quality vs real
time interaction dilemma, which is getting a lot of attention.
It’s a hybrid system that provides perfect quality with
instant gratification.
Software for the creation of Virtual
Reality scenes has almost blossomed and now it’s a matter
of computer hardware catching up as well as the interface
between the human and the presentation. Every year brings
more but the progress has been slowing.
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