by Hunter Smith

If you want to escape from the boredom of daily life,  it could all be one click away with virtual reality.

VR is an experience that takes place through a computer connected to a VR headset designed specifically to make the user feel like they are actually there.  A person using virtual reality equipment is able to look around the artificial world, move around in it, and interact with virtual features or items. The effect is commonly created by those VR headsets. An example of this is when you are sick and can’t go to a party, but instead you put on a VR headset and it makes you feel like you are at the party.

What makes the VR headset so special? The VR headsets have a head-mounted display with a small screen in front of the eyes that shows the user what they want to see. There is more that one type of VR headsets. First, there are head mounted displays, and, secondly, there are specially designed rooms with multiple large screens. A person may move around in these virtual created worlds by two ways: one with joystick controllers that track hand movements, and the other way is by four cameras set up in a room to track a user’s entire body. 

There are two main VR headsets: the Oculus Rift and HTC Vive.The HTC Vive has six different types of headsets that have different qualities. One requires a bunch of cables connected to a monitor while another is bluetooth, but it costs more. The HTC Vive’s headsets cost from $600 to $1200. The Oculus Rift has four different headsets ranging from $200 to around $500, which makes them more affordable than the Vive.

Two main uses of the VR headsets are for gaming and educational. One game, for example, has the user pretending to be a pirate and sailing across the world to fighting demons and monsters in a dungeon. For educational uses, schools are adapting VR headsets to practice surgery, or if students are home sick, they  can watch and seem like they are still in class. 

VR headsets can also be used to travel the world. There are applications such as google vr that take users anywhere in the world and make them feel like they are actually there.