HTC Vive (with Valve software) rivals Oculus in VR, with a sensor-laden device that has garnered rave reviews. Oculus Rift has generated significant interest among both early adopter consumers (like gamers) and among enterprise buyers companies like Lexus and Marriott have conducted trials of Oculus in which customers don the device to experience their products.

No VR market emerged (outside of niche categories like military usage) until Facebook acquired the Kickstarter startup Oculus for $2 billion in March, 2014.īut AR and VR are finally ready for primetime, a quarter-century after their initial boom. But the early promise of the technology fell apart due to underperforming graphics, attention-jarring lag times, outlandish hardware requirements, and the lack of an application ecosystem. In 1995, Angelina Jolie starred in the movie Hackers, which introduced mass audiences to head-mounted VR display technology. Virtual reality first experienced a boom of interest in the early 1990s, spurred by the 1991 book Virtual Reality by Howard Rheingold. My research finds that it's time to give AR and VR their due consideration when solving business problems involving either workers or for customer interactions.ĪR and VR technologies aren't new. 'About this title' may belong to another edition of this title.I've just released a major new report on Augmented Reality (AR) and Virtual Reality (VR), Augmented And Virtual Reality Should Be Part Of The Innovator's Toolkit.

Christopher Jocius, Illinois Mathematics & Science Acad., AuroraĬopyright 1991 Reed Business Information, Inc. Recommended for popular technology and science collections. He also highlights the aims of system designers and gives a good sense of the exploratory nature of this research. He describes the eerie experience of using virtual reality systems that can simulate a walk-through of a building in an architectural graphics program, interviews leading researchers, and speculates on the social and psychological implications of this technology, in which the artificial world overlaps with reality.

In this book, Rheingold, editor of Whole Earth Review, reports on his visits to virtual reality labs in industry and universities around the world. This interactive technology is used by science and engineering researchers as well as by the entertainment industry, especially in the form of video games. The term 'virtual reality' describes the computer-generated simulation of reality with physical, tactile, and visual dimensions.