Frank Steinicke Livres

This book focuses on the recent developments of virtual reality (VR) and immersive technologies, what effect they are having on our modern, digitised society and explores how current developments and advancements in this field are leading to a virtual revolution. Using Ivan Sutherland's ‘ The Ultimate Display’ and Moore’s law as a springboard, the author discusses both popular scientific and technological accounts of the past, present and possible futures of VR, looking at current research trends, developments, challenges and ethical considerations to the coming age of differing realities. Being Really Virtual is for researchers, designers and developers of VR and immersive technologies and anyone with an interest in the exponential rise of such technologies and how they are changing the very way we perceive, interact and communicate within our digital society.

Virtual reality (VR) systems utilize additional input and output channels in order to make interactions in virtual environments (VEs) more intuitive. VR technologies have the potential to provide a better insight into complex datasets, although high demands on the ability of the user to interact in the virtual space are made. When interacting in VR-based applications the cognitive effort for accomplishing interaction tasks is higher compared to the effort required when interacting via two-dimensional user interfaces. Therefore, interaction metaphors support users during an interaction process by reducing the cognitive effort required for performing certain interaction tasks by depicting complex tasks by commonly used techniques users are accustomed to. But how are such metaphors designed and adapted to the user? In this book the design and evaluation of novel multimodal interaction metaphors for generic interaction tasks in VEs is described by means of case studies. The usefulness of the proposed interaction strategies is pointed out in interactive geovisualization as well as seismic volume visualization environments.