Really Virtual Reality

Far from being geeky and exotic, virtual reality could be the key to a new range of innovative products. European researchers and industrialists have come together to build a world-leading community ready to exploit that promise. Made famous by the ‘holodeck’ in Star Trek: The Next Generation, virtual reality (VR) has long had the reputation of being slightly frivolous. Yet Europe’s VR industry is emerging as a world leader thanks to new efforts to coordinate developments on a continental scale. In VR, the user can enter a virtual world and interact with it as if it were real. In the simpler VR systems, the user views a virtual scene on a normal computer screen. This is the method used by many kinds of computer games and the famous online Second Life simulation. In more sophisticated ‘fully immersive’ systems, the user can move through a surrounding virtual environment, though not yet as realistically as portrayed in Star Trek. VR is already in use in medicine, education, training and the energy, aeronautics and car industries, but until the last few years there was little sense of cohesion amongst those working in the field.

That began to change with INTUITION, an EU-funded Network of Excellence set up in 2004 to pull together Europe’s fragmented efforts in VR. In the previous ten years we’d had a lot of new developments that made the wide use of such technologies more realistic and cost-effective. As well as more than 60 formal partners, INTUITION attracted a further 80 associated organisations. Practical services included an online knowledge base in VR, a ‘virtual lab’ where partners could use one another’s infrastructure, and an employment exchange and mobility scheme. All these things helped to build cooperation and a sense of community. An annual workshop soon grew into a major conference and has now become one of the world’s biggest trade exhibitions for the VR industry. One important application is in industrial prototyping. By building virtual prototypes rather than physical ones, the time to develop and commercialise a product can be greatly reduced, along with the costs. Links with the European Space Agency have led to projects to do with prototyping, astronaut training and remote maintenance. A remarkably simple project, developed by INRIA, showed how an illusion of texture in web pages could be created without any special equipment.

More information:

http://cordis.europa.eu/ictresults/index.cfm?section=news&tpl=article&BrowsingType=Features&ID=90613