Virtual reality
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Virtual reality (VR) is a simulated experience that employs 3D near-eye displays and pose tracking to give the user an immersive feel of a virtual world. Applications of virtual reality include entertainment, education and business. VR is one of the key technologies in the reality-virtuality continuum. As such, it is different from other digital visualization solutions, such as augmented virtuality and augmented reality.
An operator controlling The Virtual Interface Environment Workstation (VIEW) at NASA Ames
Researchers with the European Space Agency in Darmstadt, Germany, equipped with a VR headset and motion controllers, demonstrating how astronauts might use virtual reality in the future to train to extinguish a fire inside a lunar habitat
An Omni treadmill being used at a VR convention
A Missouri National Guardsman looks into a VR training head-mounted display at Fort Leonard Wood in 2015.
Jaron Lanier
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Jaron Zepel Lanier is an American computer scientist, visual artist, computer philosophy writer, technologist, futurist, and composer of contemporary classical music. Considered a founder of the field of virtual reality, Lanier and Thomas G. Zimmerman left Atari in 1985 to found VPL Research, Inc., the first company to sell VR goggles and wired gloves. In the late 1990s, Lanier worked on applications for Internet2, and in the 2000s, he was a visiting scholar at Silicon Graphics and various universities. In 2006 he began to work at Microsoft, and from 2009 has worked at Microsoft Research as an Interdisciplinary Scientist.
Lanier in 2010
Lanier performing at the Garden of Memory Solstice Concert in June 2009