A student's perspective: getting real with virtual reality

As with many up and coming technologies, the road to wide acceptance is not always smooth. Virtual reality (VR) is one such technology whose bumpy ascent is well underway. VR is not all that new but the steady price/performance gains for computational power have helped it gain a broader base of applications and even a little popularity along the way. The author's current research is one example of how VR can be used as an analysis as well as a visualization tool. He is developing interactive scenarios where the user can pose "what if?" questions in a VR environment and the VR environment will respond with an array of possibilities. The user will then be able to experience and better assess the impacts of each alternative. The interactive aspects of VR make it an ideal platform for developing scenarios across a broad range of applications.