Homework 8

Mark Chen, mchen200

CS 428 - Week 11 Homework 8

Virtual reality has come a long way from seeing pictures while listening to sounds in a big machine, to headgear and controllers that allow you to interact with the virtual world. Virtual reality has become a form of entertainment, information, and practice. In any aspect of virtual reality, whether it is informative, or training, I think virtual reality always has that entertainment aspect, because users are placed in a virtual world that could be foreign which users can explore and interact with. The use of tracking, and cameras make the interactions in the virtual world feel like a reality, that things you do in real life are reflected on what you see in the virtual world. Tracking and cameras give the user a three hundred and sixty degree point of view, where users can look all around them in the virtual world, whether the user wants to look forward, up, down, or behind, the user has to turn their head or body to look that way.

For the most part, virtual reality is mainly single player. However, some virtual reality programs allow collaboration which means multiple users in a shared virtual world. Everything in this shared virtual world is accessible to all users, all users would be able to see other users (in their own avatar, not real life person), and users are able to communicate with other users (probably in the form of voice chat through a microphone). A basic example of collaborative virtual reality would be the program, “VRChat” where users join a virtual world to chat and hang out with others. Users choose their own avatar, and interact with other users in their avatar. Another example of collaboration virtual reality is “TabletopSimulatorVR” which allows VR users to play tabletop games in virtual reality. Users can manipulate the game pieces with their controllers. Other users can also manipulate the same pieces too, and can communicate with others.

With that being said, there are many positives and negatives about collaborative virtual reality. Starting with the positives, one of the positive aspects of collaboration is entertainment. You are placed in a virtual world; a new world to explore and mess around with no repercussions. Not only that, but you get to mess around that world with other users. Another positive for collaborative virtual reality ia information. Say you are in a team of doctors and have to examine a patient's MRI. The team of doctors can enter a virtual world of the patient’s MRI and navigate through it to find any irregularities to help the patient.This would probably be better in a co-located collaboration. Another positive of collaborative virtual reality is practice in the form of simulations. Simulators that are or could be collaborative would be like law enforcement, or military simulations.

There are some negatives to collaboration virtual reality though. For example, co-located collaborations like the CAVE eat up a lot of energy since there’s monitors turned on all around the user(s). It is also very expensive to have of your own. There’s also issues where the virtual reality seems so real that causes the user to react themselves such as falling or moving in virtual reality but bumping into objects in real life. Collaboration is probably more distracting and more likely to cause these goofs because there are other users to divert your attention from reality. All in all, virtual reality is great, and collaboration makes it more interesting. Something I would like to see from virtual reality collaboration would be a massive multiplayer online role playing game (MMORPG) that involves collaboration.