What is virtual reality?
Virtual reality (VR or virtual reality in English), is a technology that allows diving into a virtual world, to live an immersive and tactile experience. Like Steven Spielberg’s film Ready Player One, your movements influence the action of the game or the virtual world you are visiting using a helmet, sensors, or a seat. This gives you the feeling of fighting zombies or experiencing a roller coaster ride without leaving your home! It is now a must in the field of video games.
How does a VR headset work?
A VR headset encompasses the entire field of vision of its user by broadcasting an image for each eye. The brain will then bring together these two images to transform them into a 3D vision.
Thanks to suitable software, the headset follows your movements and integrates them into the virtual world using a headset, joysticks or motion detection sensors. So if these images project an outside environment, you feel like you are seeing the sky when you look up, etc. This feeling of immersion is possible thanks to the extreme fluidity and the large display capacities offered by the helmet. The higher the resolution of the images and their repetition rate, the more impressive the experience will be.
There are different types of headsets, whether for console , PC, smartphone, or stand-alone. Their price obviously varies according to their capacities and their materials. There is now a wide choice of VR headsets, at a variety of prices.
A revolution?
The advantage of VR is that it offers a safe immersive experience. It is now used in professional sectors such as aviation or architecture, to train or visualize a project. Likewise, we find it more and more in the cultural field, partly in museums.
In addition, medicine is very interested in this technology, because it would affect the cognitive and emotional components of pain. It is thus more and more used in therapies to treat phobias, and thus overcome his fear of heights, water, or spiders.
Léa tested virtual reality, she tells us about her experience: “I tested a virtual reality headset for the first time in a museum abroad. We were faced with a model of a temple destroyed for thousands of years. years and of which only ruins remain today. By trying on the helmet, I was able to walk around the temple as if it was still standing.! I was thus able to explore every nook and cranny. very concrete and pleasant. “
