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We are an immersive Virtual Reality and Augmented Reality Agency that makes mesmerizing content which moves the audience in enticing new ways.

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Why augumented reality is important

Augmented reality provides new ways to deliver digital 3D models and data. Augmented reality is the technique of enhancing computer graphics to a user’s view of the physical world. Augmented reality (AR) is an experience where designers increase parts of users’ physical world with computer-generated input. With AR applications, you can bring experiences closer to users in their own environments through designs that are more fascinated, personalized, and—indeed—amazing. 

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The Changing Technology Landscape of Medical Education and Communication

The world is entering a new era of medicine, one that challenges the very physical barriers that divide us. Spearheading this revolution is the clever manipulation of reality in augmented, virtual, and mixed environments to provide access to doctors for patients from anywhere in the world. Supplemented by advanced artificial intelligence systems, the students of today are set to become some of the most proficient physicians in human history.

What technologies are currently available? What new obstacles will tomorrow bring? These considerations will be critical in identifying areas for innovation in modern medicine and determining how best to prepare for the future. The ongoing pandemic is a potent reminder of the dangers of complacency in a globally connected society. The rapid integration of these and other technologies will be crucial to our ongoing relevance as a species and cultivate explosive growth in the healthcare industry.

The global market size for augmented and virtual reality in healthcare was approximately $800 million in 2019 and is expected to exceed $3.5 billion by the end of 2026.  eMarketer projects that over 83 million people in the United States will use AR at least once per month in 2020, a quarter of its population.  Europe, North America, and Asia-Pacific remain the primary markets.

Healthcare systems are notoriously asynchronous, with most hospitals operating relatively independent of one another. AR systems provide the opportunity for seamless integration of medical teams at a distance. A sudden influx of patients can quickly lead to strained hospital resources; with the integration of AR technologies, medical professionals can be rapidly recruited to the facilities where they’re needed and healthcare providers can even reach their patients in non-medical settings. Experts may be virtually recruited to pandemic hotspots to quickly bolster the frontline of a sudden outbreak that otherwise might have overwhelmed local hospital resources. Professionals can also access patients in remote emergencies such as in schools, open water, or an accident.

A majority of VR and AR applications have thus far been applied to anatomy and physiology. Massive online databases house meticulously detailed information on the mechanisms and structure of the human body and the mechanisms of its physiology. This information is used to simulate a digital rendition of human forms for interaction and study and provide a significantly more intimate educational experience. Manifestations of this so-called “in silico” biology links concepts dynamically to produce a more holistic understanding for students. Hololens by Microsoft has exemplified this elegantly in their work with Case Western Reserve University to provide state-of-the-art technology for a cadaver-free facility for medical students. After donning a set of glasses, students can interact with a digital model of the human brain in a fully immersive environment.

AR technology has also empowered companies focused on life sciences to more clearly educate healthcare providers on their products. augmented reality healthcare can produce immersive illustrations of their products and showcase the impact throughout the course of a given disease, and thus more clarity to patients by extension. EyeDecide uses augmented reality to simulate ophthalmological issues for patients to more accurately communicate their symptoms. AR assistance can be broadly applied from assisting nurses in finding veins, to helping surgeons in the operating room.

Research into the efficacy of virtual and overwhelmingly supports its positive impacts. Systems can require a sizeable investment but provide freely reproducible training sessions tailored to the desired difficulty and outcome of users.  Studies have confirmed the acceleration of the learning process, improved performance accuracy, and a decrease in practice required. In examining the efficacy of augmented reality for the learning of anatomy, “100% of respondents reported that AR either greatly or partially facilitated learning.” Students in this study scored significantly higher on academic tests than their traditionally trained peers. Over three separate studies, 80.5% of physicians rated AR as “Excellent” or “Good,” and all unanimously recommended AR be used to supplement current anatomy curriculums.  Indeed, the growing number of augmented reality applications are rapidly adapting to every feasible facet of medical education.

As the COVID-19 pandemic continues to suspend traditional formats, educators are increasingly turning to alternatives in remote education. Wearing the Microsoft HoloLens, a physician attending to a COVID patient can share a feed of treatment in real-time to virtually any number of observers without the need for additional PPE.  Similarly, the outbreak has pushed remote-assistance into active duty on the frontline, as medical workers are rapidly trained in the operation of ventilators through the virtual projection and instructions superimposed over their view of the real-world.          

Adoption is rapidly progressing for this exciting technology, and the myriad of applications will only continue to expand. CGS’s Teamwork AR provides step-by-step AR training on any device, anywhere to give a rich and thorough learning experience. More than ever, the need for virtual training for medical personnel is paramount, and it will be through such technologies that the challenges of the pandemic will be overcome.

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The Future of Virtual Reality in Healthcare.

Virtual Reality is the utilization of computer technology to create a particular kind of reality emulation. Virtual Reality creates a fake situation to inhabit. VR is being used in healthcare since 2016 and still enhancing the way hospitalization and healthcare works. In Healthcare education VR enables patients to be taken through their surgical arrangement by virtually stepping into a person-specific 360° virtual recreation of their pathology and body structure. This innovation can be used in emergency and surgical training, also monitoring the behavior of a patient, opening windows to vast market in future. With our vast availability of virtual reality services in healthcare industry AltRealityX is here to help you.

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Advantages of virtual reality training

The use of virtual reality as a training tool is well known, in particular in the field of surgery. Medical schools have adopted this technology as a way of teaching the next generation of surgeons, for example robotic surgery.

The medical uses of virtual reality are covered in more detail in our training for surgery article within this section.

The healthcare sector is a major user of virtual reality but there are other sectors who have equally adopted this technology for training purposes. These include education, armed forces, construction, telecoms and business.

So what are the advantages of virtual reality training in these sectors and many others?

The benefits are:

Little/no risk

Safe, controlled area

Realistic scenarios

Can be done remotely saving time and money

Improves retention and recall

Simplifies complex problems/situations

Suitable for different learning styles

Innovative and enjoyable

The last item is an important one. Training is easier if the experience is pleasant or enjoyable which means higher level of engagement and understanding.

Time and money are also important factors. Training is necessary to ensure that people are able to perform their jobs or learn a subject in order to be fully productive. But the costs can be prohibitive, for example, developing a series of prototypes. Technologies of virtual reality removes the needs for repeated prototyping and/or implementation which we know can be expensive. What it does instead is to replace this with a single model which can be used time and time again. Plus it can be accessed from different locations. Both of these save time and money.

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Escape to the future with virtual reality

Plonk a set of smart glasses or a virtual-reality helmet before the philosopher Plato, and after his fastidious recoil there would be a moment of self-righteousness: “I told you so.”

Plato’s ”Allegory of the Cave“ has its inhabitants chained up and gazing at a stony wall. Over it flicker shadows that they take for reality. As we plug in, turn on and zone out with our current repertoire of virtuality-generating devices, we will find it worth musing over the challenge that Plato poses: do wisdom-lovers break those chains, as he suggests, and leave the cave to seek reality? Or do they stay put, finally face down the old misery-guts super-rationalist, and assert that this new layer of simulated experience is as natural to humans as play or art?

Simulation already draws on mythology. The much-heralded Magic Leap platform – which sees reality “augmented” as you look upon it, rather than entirely simulated like in a video game – sends household robot-gods scurrying around under tables and schools of whales undulating across the ceiling. Other human beings can be mapped in your augmented eyesight and rendered as cultural icons, creatures, objects, or aliens. An entirely new popular-culture storm is gathering here; last year’s Pokémon Go phenomenon was the merest flurry.

Gameful world

Still, it’s good to keep Plato’s admonitions about delusion and illusion in mind. We have come through a decade in which general enthusiasm for a “gameful world” (as theorist Jane McGonigal might put it) held out the hope of new forms of education and work. A generation of managers asked: look at all the free labour people do in World of Warcraft, Minecraft and No Man’s Sky. Can’t we “gamify” our endeavour or enterprise to elicit a similar kind of commitment? Not just for profit, but for social good, for mental health?

This agenda has progressed somewhat into the mainstream. In the current series of House of Cards, Frank Underwood’s presidential challenger – the damaged military hero Will Conway – uses a war-gaming VR headset as therapy for his post-traumatic stress disorder.

Yet the “serious games” movement (which has an upcoming conference in July at George Mason University in Manassas, Virginia) can rarely overcome the oldest truth about any human engagement with games, play or mimicry – that being able to freely chose to play the game, beyond utility or coercion, is the very point of it.

Freedom to play

This freedom to play is not just a rabbit hole into which one’s attention disappears. The link between freedom and play could perhaps be preserved in a “serious” game if the political stakes were high enough. Some regard virtual world creation as a tool, as yet barely wielded, for reordering society. In his recent book Postcapitalism, Paul Mason wonders why we have “no models that capture economic complexity, in the way computers are used to simulate weather, population, epidemics or traffic flows”.

Mason’s simulations would be “agent-based” and unpredictable: you create a million digital people with digital resources and needs, set them loose in a synthetic world, and are informed and illuminated by what emerges.

The assumption is that economics needs to be much better at anticipating major surprises and crises that arise from messily motivated – rather than rationally maximising – human beings. Synthetic worlds, with their increasingly daunting simulation power, can set those hares running.

Rehearsal for reality

So virtuality could indeed rehearse you for the complexity of the real world, not just act as an escape from it. The optimism of the current wave of AI pioneers, such as Google’s DeepMind, is that their learning machines can be the great assistants of – not grim replacements for – human ambition, vision and will.

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What is augmented reality, anyway?

Augmented reality systems show virtual objects in the real world – like cat ears and whiskers on a Snapchat selfie, or how well a particular chair might fit in a room. The first big break for AR was the “Pokémon GO” game, released in 2016 with a feature that let players see virtual Pokémon standing in front of them, ready to be captured and played with. Now, technology companies like Microsoft and Mozilla – the company behind the Firefox browser – and even retail businesses like IKEA and Lego are exploring the potential of AR.

Where I do research, an AR lab at the University of Michigan School of Information, it seems everyone knows about AR and is excited about the technology becoming popular among the general public. My colleagues and I watch videos of impressive AR demonstrations, try out new applications and play with new devices. The research community’s enthusiasm may be why several experts – including some I talk with – say they expect AR to be commonplace in five years, or envision AR glasses replacing smartphones within a decade.

But as an AR researcher with expertise in both industry and academia, I disagree with those optimistic views. Most people in the U.S. haven’t heard of AR – and most of those who have don’t really know what it is. And that’s just one barrier between augmented reality today and a future where it is everywhere. Overall, there are three major challenges to be overcome.

Hardware difficulties

When I first tried AR glasses three years ago, they quickly overheated and shut down – even when trying to do something fairly basic, like placing two virtual objects in a room. While there has been a lot of improvement in this respect, other problems have emerged. The HoloLens system – one of the most advanced AR headsets – essentially requires a user to carry a Microsoft Kinect system and a computer on their head, which is quite heavy and limits the user’s field of view. A different issue are AR experiences that work across systems.

Even “Pokémon GO,” the most popular app that actually uses AR, drains smartphone batteries extremely rapidly. And the AR function doesn’t make the game much better – or really different at all – though it is neat at first to see a Pikachu standing on the lawn in front of you. With so little benefit and such a severe hit to device performance, every player I know, including me, has turned off the AR mode.

Lack of real uses so far

Just as people turn off AR in “Pokémon GO,” I’ve never seen or heard of anyone actually using IKEA’s furniture app as it’s allegedly intended; the app has just 3,100 reviews in Apple’s app store, far fewer than the 104,000 for “Pokémon GO.” It’s supposed to be useful to people seeking to redesign their living spaces, letting them use their smartphones to add virtual furniture to actual rooms.

Apple and Google have released AR toy and demo apps built with their new platforms ARKit and ARCore – such as playing with virtual dominos. They are engaging, and the 3D models look great. They do what they’re designed to do, but their functions aren’t especially useful.

This is partly due to the fact that AR, like the internet, is just a basic technology that needs people to create uses for it. The internet started as Arpanet in 1969, but began to grow widely only when Tim Berners-Lee invented the “World Wide Web” – a now-dated term – in 1989. And it wasn’t until the 2000s that regular people who used the internet could also create online content for others to consume. That level of development and innovation has not yet happened for AR, though Mozilla is taking initial steps in this direction by trying to bring AR to everyday web browsers like Firefox.

Marketing challenges

Even people who use Snapchat don’t think of it as an augmented reality app – though that’s exactly what it is. It’s AR technology that figures out where to put the dog ears, heart eyes or whiskers on their friends’ faces – and sends rainbow vomit out of their mouths. People who don’t know what augmented reality is, or who have never consciously experienced it – even if they use it daily – aren’t going to make a purchase just because a product has some AR capability.

There’s also some confusion in labeling and marketing of AR technologies. Many people have started to hear about virtual reality, which is generally an immersive fully virtual world that doesn’t include aspects of the user’s real environment. The distinctions get fuzzier with mixed reality – sometimes labeled “MR” but other times “XR.” Originally the term meant anything in between a fully real and a fully virtual experience – which could include AR. But now Microsoft is saying products and apps are MR if they provide both augmented and fully virtual experiences. That leaves customers unclear what’s being advertised – though they’ll know it might not be very useful and may run their phone batteries down quickly.

I’m with my AR-optimist friends and colleagues in seeing a lot of potential for the future, but there’s a long way to go. They – and I – are already working hard on making the hardware better, finding useful applications and clarifying product labeling. But it will take lots of this hard work and probably many more years before mainstream America lives in a truly augmented reality.

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What is the future of Virtual Reality?

Virtual Reality (VR) is a computer-generated environment with scenes and objects that appear to be real, making the user feel they are immersed in their surroundings. VR allows us to immerse ourselves in video games as if we were one of the characters, learn how to perform heart surgery or improve the quality of sports training to maximise performance. Virtual Reality is one of the technologies with the highest projected potential for growth. Nowadays, the market is demanding applications that go beyond leisure, tourism or marketing and are more affordable for users. All this means that Virtual Reality is no longer science fiction. It is integrated into our present and, in the coming years, it will lead to advances that will shape the future. With reviews key to the online experience, virtual reality technology could give a flavour of the real experience, before people commit their credit card details! 

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12 Smart Virtual Reality Opportunities For Businesses in 2020

Virtual reality will have a wide and lasting impact on our work, education and home lives. The emergence of commercial VR technologies has led to an increase in innovation, with a wide range of businesses looking for Virtual Reality opportunities in 2020.

A group of successful entrepreneurs make predictions about the future of VR in business and we think these might be the smart VR opportunities that businesses are looking for.

12 members from Young Entrepreneur Council, community of successful young entrepreneurs share their ideas on how “Virtual Reality” technologies will be used by businesses in the next years:

1. Brands Will Use VR to Improve Customer Loyalty

Brands and VR were made for each other. Businesses and brands will engage consumers with story-driven VR experiences that educate and entertain. This will create a new kind of relationship between brands and their audience as they start becoming active participants instead of passive bystanders. The hardest thing to do as a brand is to get your audience to actually feel something. Immersive, interactive VR experiences will get people closer to feeling, which gets people closer to caring.

2. There Will Be Changes in Teleconferencing

Trying to connect everyone by phone and talking to laggy, pixelated faces on a flat screen is probably one of the most hated things in modern business. Virtual reality will change that and allow these sorts of meetings to take on a more personal and natural feel. As the technology progresses hopefully it will be able to incorporate expressions, eye contact and other human elements we currently lack. This will make our telecommuting lives better and our meetings more productive. When fully formed it might even reduce business travel significantly.

3. Virtual Reality Will Improve E-Commerce for Products That Require Fit

Complemented with augmented reality, VR will have a big impact on online shopping. One industry that’s not making as big a breakthrough as others is shopping for things that need to fit well (whether clothes for you or furniture for your place). Being able to “see” those things to determine the fit will remove the handicap for these products and open the floodgates for online shopping that have been lagging. It will be amazing to see how a couch would look in your living room before buying it.

4. There Will Be Changes in the Education Market

From applications for all levels of education, including college and university classes, virtual reality can make learning more enriching and enjoyable as well as address some of the various ways people learn that current curriculums cannot seem to individually address. Companies that can offer educational products that use virtual reality have a real opportunity.

5. There Will Be an Improved Design Process for Products

I think it will further enhance the ability to design products. With virtual reality and simulations, you can do much better user testing without them having to be in the same room and get faster feedback, as well as make much quicker changes. This will decrease the overall cost of production.

6. VR Will Offer the Opportunity to Have an “Anywhere” Experience

VR’s use cases for businesses are only limited by our imagination. A huge application I expect in the near future is in e-commerce. Currently, one of the biggest issues with e-commerce, for both the store and the consumer, is ordering something that doesn’t match your expectations. VR gives us the opportunity to create the “anywhere” experience so that a user can manipulate a product and get a better understanding of what they’re buying. The same can be said of booking hotel rooms, cars, travel and adventure tours. Virtual reality is poised to bring the world to you, just like the internet itself, on a more nuanced level.

7. It Will Offer Improvements in Entertainment Like Movies, Media and Games

Entertainment will be the first industry to get disrupted by VR. Imagine sitting in your living room and watching the Superbowl with VR. VR takes you right in the stadium. It will have a similar impact on movies and gaming. I was at CES recently and I saw that even a one-person VR startup had 10 minute-long queues simply for trying out the demo. The VR economy will easily surpass the app economy in my view.

8. Virtual Reality Will Definitely Advance Real Estate Sales

Nobody is satisfied purchasing a house based on pictures, and some people would rather not go “house hunting” physically. VR could be a great bridge between those who would like to see the property up-close and those who’d prefer a less involved approach. It will assist agents in increasing turnover by making fewer site visits, and might be a more efficient (and secure) way to conduct business in real estate. While it might currently be reserved for apps on smartphones and tourism, VR has the potential to change how we make investments into property. There’s a huge opportunity for a company that will be able to assist realtors in capturing real-time imagery of each property in a manner that is timely and user-friendly.

9. HR Departments Will Become 100 Percent Remote

I think the best aspect of virtual reality is that employees can have more engaging interactions with the HR department, whether it is in the interview process, training, or just a simple meeting. This will be able to happen from anywhere in the world and still feel as though they are sitting across from you. For example, instead of asking an employee a situational question and getting their reply, we could actually put them in a situation in VR and see how they truly react. This will take HR to a whole new level never before experienced.

10. It Will Impact the Health and Fitness Industry

Virtual reality will become a tremendous performance hack for anyone who wants to visualize the future as if it is already here. Athletes and doctors are already using hardware like OculusVR (acquired by Facebook) to visualize all of their goals coming into fruition, including perfect health and performance. People will finally be able to step outside of themselves and hit the winning shot, beat illness, or close the perfect deal.

11. It Will Offer Immersive, On-the-Job Learning Experiences

I’m most excited about the opportunity of virtual reality apps to facilitate learning and relationship building in a business setting. You’ll be able to master public speaking by practicing in front of a virtual audience, you’ll be able to see how business is conducted in Japan by working virtually from that office for a week, and your avatar can get together regularly, face to face, with your boss across the country. The number of skills you’ll be able to acquire and mentors you’ll be able to tap will explode when there are no practical or geographic limits.

12. Geographical Location Will Become Irrelevant

Already we live in a virtual age, where with the usage of Skype, Google Hangouts and other forms of digital media it doesn’t really matter where you are physically located. However, with the advancement of virtual reality, not only will it not matter where you are geographically, but it will actually appear as if you are in the same place even when you are thousands of miles apart.

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It’s Time To Get Ready For Augmented Reality

Augmented reality technologies are set to change industries – from construction to retail – and transform the way we interact with the digital world in everyday life. Augmented reality is the technique of adding computer graphics to a user’s view of the physical world. Augmented Reality will allow us to have greater awareness and control of Internet of Things (IoT) devices in smart homes, factories, farms and offices. It is no surprise that all the major tech companies, and many startups, are rushing to get AR technology to users before anyone else. If we can inspire people with diverse backgrounds and skill sets to build their own VR experiences, great things could happen. 

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VR/AR IN AUTOMOTIVE INDUSTRY: MANUFACTURE, BUY, AND DRIVE CARS SMARTER

Lexus, Audi, Cadillac, Volvo, Nissan, Ford, Mercedes. What is common between all these car brands? Yes, these are the cars that do their job. But that`s not the right answer. The right answer is that all these companies use VR and AR to design, manufacture, and sell cars. Because it’s the era of augmented (AR) and virtual reality (VR) in the automotive industry. You might have missed this information but you will know everything after reading this article, I assure you.

Augmented reality (AR) and virtual reality(VR) are passing trends for the automotive industry: car companies have been using it for many years already.  They also place a bet on VR & AR  to transform the shopping experience and make it more personalized, informative and less stressful for modern shoppers. They want people to enjoy the driving; not only get from one place to another. Drivers enjoy augmented reality in the automotive industry using smart windshields and fixing problems with the help of AR car repair. Those who create cars and those who drive them have embraced VR and AR, and that’ s the good news. Because it means more comfort and more smart solutions.

It seems like you can’t do anything without AR or VR today if you love cars.

One of the most influential world banks, Goldman Sachs, has created a report on the potential of VR and AR market. The bank predicts that the market opportunity for the industry will be $80 billion by 2025, $35 billion of which will belong to VR and AR software. And the chances are high that AR and VR in the automotive industry will bite off a big piece of this tasty $35 billion pie to speed up the technological progress. Using virtual and augmented reality software for the automotive industry is the way to make manufacturing, designing, and driving cars smarter.

“Use VR to Check How Safe and Comfortable It Is”

Such companies as Ford use VR because they think that it’s fundamental to “getting things right and really collaborating well.” The company has their own lab for experiencing a prototype of a car long before it’s manufactured. This lab called FIVE, and designers and engineers use it more and more often because they can assess aesthetics and its safety and make as many changes as they want. More than that, Ford didn`t stop on using VR for cars’ manufacture. The company also uses virtual reality to unite international teams to receive an instant feedback on car prototypes. And that’s huge. FIVE by Ford Joe Guzman, an engineering group manager at Vehicle Assembly Structure and Virtual Reality Center at General Motors claims that:

“VR offers the ability to very early in the development process make decisions in an accurately represented manner in a life-like representation of the vehicle that in many years past would have required a physical property.”

So with VR, you can see the prototype of a future car in 1:1 ratio. It would take weeks or even months and the incredible number of human hours to create the physical representation of the same car for further modification. VR for car designers is the ultimate chance to experience the car and modify it an infinite number of times.

And designers and car manufacturers can do it with the help of CAVEs (Cave Automatic Virtual Environment). CAVE is a  virtual reality environment created specifically for designers and engineers,  in which projections are located in the way that they take the whole space of a cube. Actually, this technology was invented almost 50 years ago but VR in the automotive industry brought valuable changes into it. By using CAVE specialists can assess car safety, comfort, and design quality.

“Stop Checking These Reviews, Visit a VR Car Dealership”

Not everyone wants to communicate with a car dealer (I would pay additionally not to talk to him). The idea that someone is there just to swindle as much money from you as possible is rather stressing. Besides, if you know little about cars, you might feel awkward or you might drive out of the car dealership in the car you didn’t plan to buy in the first turn.

That’s why car companies are betting on virtual reality experience. If you have already bought your ticket to the world of virtual reality paying $800 for HTC Vive, car brands can offer you a cool alternative to automobile dealerships – virtual reality showrooms. The thing is that for the majority of millennial sales talk is irritating and distressing. More than that, the sales environment itself doesn’t bring the sense of trust. Car manufacturers know it, that’s why they want their car dealerships to look nothing like car dealerships at all.

Cadillac is already betting on virtual reality showrooms to compete with BMW, Audi, and Mercedes. The brand wants something exclusive, and in their opinion, no cars in an auto salon are rather exclusive. So if you decide to buy a Cadillac one day, don’t be shocked to find a completely empty car dealership and a pair of VR goggles. That’s basically all you need to choose if you want this Cadillac or no.

“Go to This VR Car Showroom even if You’re Buying a Used Car”

If you thought that VR was for luxury car segment only, you were wrong. Vroom has revolutionized the market for used cars by offering customers to visit a dealership for a test drive. Now customers in Houston, Grand Prairie, Austin, and Phoenix can choose among 15 different vehicles using HTC Vive only. So far these virtual reality car showrooms are generating a lot of hype among visitors, and Vroom is planning to open some more. Vroom is well aware of the fact that spending $15000- $25000 is a serious decision (especially if you do it online), that’s why the company wants to make it less stressful and more experiential for its customers.

It’s also a good way to avoid car-buying horror stories.

“Take a Virtual Reality Test Drive with Gigi”

Want to take a test drive of new Audi with Gigi Hadid? Come on, Gigi is waiting. You don’t need to go anywhere: just grab this VR headset and take this test drive for God’s sake.

You thought that nothing could compare to actual test drive and the roar of the engine. But no, virtual reality test drive can be the next big thing for the automotive industry. It’s as exciting as real driving and you can’t crash this brand new car. Audi created this virtual reality test drive with a supermodel to make you feel like a star.

For this, Volvo is promising a first fully immersive test drive for a full experience of intuitive and pleasant driving. What do you need for that? The company offers you to download an ar app to enjoy a breathtaking mountain drive using your smartphone and a pair of Google Cardboard only. BMW has acknowledged the fact that selling cars will be more challenging with time because as Michele Fuhs, head of BMW Group Premium Retail Experience, admitted:

“We are competing with the entertainment industry.”

So virtual reality test drives will become an ordinary experience.

Giving customers a pleasant and interesting experience is the only chance to hook them. Because there are plenty of cars that can be more comfortable or less expensive. If you can show me that your car can drive me to the Wonderland, I will be more inclined to buy it.

Just take a look at this Lexus NX first of its kind VR Car Configurator and Stimulator developed for Oculus Rift. The company offers its customers to take a ride in … a, no more no less, different dimension. In other words, Lexus wants its customers to have extraordinary emotional experience, not another one boring test drive in a company of a chatting car dealer. Augmented reality windshield is the technology that becomes the bridge between ordinary users and the world of AR and VR. Because it’s basically a browser window in your car. And this augmented reality windshield is so easy that even my grandpa can understand the concept.

So with augmented reality windshield, you can see all the necessary information for driving just in front of you. It means that you don’t need to take your hands away from the wheel or look away from the road to find out where you are. You won’t miss that message from Gigi. Your car will provide you with the all the necessary geographical information AND will tell you about today’s menu in the local pub.  Visteon, the company that creates instrument cluster displays for cars, has introduced an augmented reality windshield with simple and color-coded imagery. The graphics are intuitive and really useful: for instance, a driver sees a red circle around the car that is about to break and marks pedestrians on the sidewalks.

Use Augmented Reality Car Repair to Fix It

I’ve already told you how Hyundai is targeting millennials with smart augmented reality car repair. Now let’s talk about serious stuff. Not every car problem can be fixed easily. Sometimes even the most experienced mechanics are not able to cope with some challenging situations. Porsche is sure that AR glasses are the solution to this problem. If a Porsche technician working in the UK cannot solve some problem, he/she can contact Porsche’s Atlanta-based support team to get some ideas. The thing is the team in Atlanta will see exactly the same things via their AR glasses.

Conclusion

AR/VR and automotive industry are together for long, it`s definitely not a one night stand. There are too many perks for all the participants of the process to ignore it. Drivers receive a chance to choose a car in a virtual reality car showroom, to test drive it in a company of supermodel, to navigate it with more comfort, and to fix it if there is a problem with a help of augmented reality car app. Virtual and augmented reality help engineers and designers to model and improve a car before the first detail is even built. Modeling in VR makes the car safer, more comfortable, and more intuitive to use. And saves a lot of time and money that’s why GM, Ford, Hyundai, and other big players embrace VR and AR technologies.

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Creating Unforgettable Experiences Through VR

Life experiences differ from one person to another, from one place to the other. VR brings the places and activities to you, with the comfort of your home or anywhere in the world. You can immerse and interact with 3D worlds you never thought possible before. VR allows you to expand your horizon, to see beyond yourself and into the world. VR helps encourage compliance, one of the primary motivators for electronic learning, from its user as it turns a passive learning experience into an active learning experience. VR helps you in level up your shopping experience. Be it for reliving memories, therapeutic shopping, going places, or developing skills, VR undoubtedly provides a whole new platform for experiencing life. You can create even more unforgettable experiences with the best virtual reality system today. 

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For many people, virtual reality is associated with video games and entertainment. This technology, however, has huge potential in the real estate industry. The power of VR technology can help real estate agents grow their business, get more clients, and deliver top-level services. Typically, clients visit multiple properties before deciding on the one they want. VR technology helps solve these problems, allowing millions of people to virtually visit properties without leaving their homes. Simply put on a VR headset and you can experience immersive, three-dimensional walk throughof properties. Virtual reality technology is a great way for realtors to market  properties with very little investment. VR allows you to create stunning 3D real estate tours and get properties staged so that your clients can check them out. Virtual reality is going to become a big thing, and it will transform many industries. If you want to stay updated on how businesses can implement VR and other new technologies then please visit here http://www.altrealityx.com/

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How Virtual Reality can take Animation to Next Level

Virtual Reality (VR) is slowly, if not stealthily taking over the world. Offering users immersive worlds, VR promises to transform the ways that we entertain ourselves. VR helps to make older media new again as it breathes life into the standards we have become accustomed to. The medium is finding applicability into many differing fields such as gaming, training material and education. Yet, in many ways, virtual reality is still finding its footing as creators attempt to identify more usable applications for the medium. And while VR has made major inroads into entertainment, it also comes as no surprise that animation is especially poised to make huge strides with regards to animation. Yet the question remains, how much does virtual reality have to offer the field of animation? Can it help to create something completely bold and new? What we are going to find out is that virtual reality is equipped to take animation to unseen realms.

See Everything

As John Lee Head of Productions at Spiel Creative noted, “Animated videos can express so much without saying a word. In these videos, music and moving images can transport viewers into another dimension, cultivating emotions, entertaining, creating suspense, and engaging them to the end of the animation”. Yet, for the most part, animated video is a representation of a three-dimensional world rendered for a two-dimensional screen. Even where 3D video is concerned, the limitation of the screen means that the 3D effect is somewhat nullified by the medium on which it is shown. Virtual reality gives animators the assurance that this hurdle can be crossed with the ability to create rich environments that aren’t compromised by the technology itself. Through VR, users will witness rich environments previously hampered by the shortfalls of by 2D rendering and appreciate the finer details in design that animators create with painstaking detail.

Boosts Interactivity

Before there was virtual reality, there were simply the viewer and the media. The viewer had no participation in the events unfolding on the screen and he or she was a non-factor in the story. While choose-your-own-adventure books and videos allowed users to take a greater part in the stories, the arrival of virtual reality promises an even richer immersive experience as it allows users to submerge themselves into the story. Not only will users be allowed to interact with the characters in the story, they can also become one of the characters.

Crank up Emotional Appeal

Story telling is all about manipulating the emotions of the viewer. Whether these emotions are happy, sad, afraid or surprised, the point of storytelling is to draw those emotions out of the viewer and then confront them with it. It is not surprising then that creating a more immersive environment using virtual reality will magnify the effect on the viewer. Some users liken the experience of VR to being conscious within a vivid dream. This is the type of reaction that virtual reality seeks to eke out from viewers. It wants to make viewers see themselves as characters in the story and not just bystanders. Users will have a heightened sense of empathy that is impossible with regular animation.

Adaptability

Using virtual reality to tell stories will also help to bridge the gap between animation and video games. With VR, animators will be able to create an immersive story in which users can go off the beaten path if they so wish. The world of virtual reality is similar to the real world in which the user has agency and can act upon his or her desires. Thus, creators can adapt their stories so that users can explore a plethora of choices that animation alone wouldn’t be able to provide. The user chooses how to participate and the creator’s job is to create as many avenues for expression as possible. This type of design will also encourage users to engage in repeat viewings as they attempt to exhaust all the possibilities present in the virtual world.

Guided Perspective

Animation, as shown on the screen, relies on a neutral observer. The audience is a blank canvas upon which the animation imparts its point of view. Virtual reality all but does away with that role of neutral observer. The viewer is now a participant in the story. Not only do the characters have a stake in the outcome, but so does the participant. The participant is made to adopt a perspective for the duration of the video. Yet, the user isn’t forced to take a particular perspective as in traditional animation. He or she can choose from one of many perspectives as he or she sees fit.

Different Experiences

Many people viewing an animated video will all have experienced it a homogenous way. While it’s true that every person is the sum total of his or her experiences and will, of course, have nuanced reactions to different parts of the work including characterization, setting, the nature of the conflict and the story’s final resolution. However, these differences are amplified when the story is told through virtual reality. Since it is possible for two people to have completely different treks through the virtual world, it is possible that their experiences in those virtual worlds are as dissimilar as chalk and cheese. So instead of a single story, the virtual reality creator has effectively crated multiple stories. Users will have the benefit of comparing their stories and reinserting themselves in the virtual worlds so as to experiences the minute differences.

The art of storytelling has been refined for thousands of years. New technology doesn’t drastically change the art form, but only gives it new tent poles under which it is practiced. While the future looks bright for the intersection of animation with virtual reality, keep in mind that we are yet to see how much of an effect VR can truly have on animation and storytelling. Clearly, with the creation of such immersive worlds and an abundance of paths and choices, the boundaries of virtual reality seem at times limitless. And with the rules of virtual reality still being reassessed, we may yet stumble upon new and fantastic applications for the medium. However, as of right now, animation seems destined for a healthy confluence with virtual reality.  You can create even more unforgettable experiences with the best virtual reality system today.

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The virtual reality (VR) business kept on creating throughout the following couple of decades. The tech world can’t quit discussing VR because of the most recent wearable tech items; VR is more open than any other time in recent memory. VR is known for transforming the gaming and entertainment industry in particular but it is also beginning to revolutionize other industries such as healthcare, retail and education. In just two years time, technology will be able to create an experience for humans where we are unable to tell the difference between the virtual and real world, with the merging of augmented reality and VR. Virtual reality technology help to experience life on Mars will also allow development and research to take place that will help more sustainable human missions. In your lifetime, you will have your own virtual shopping assistant. Are you ready for a more virtual world in the next 50 years?  

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What is Virtual Reality?

The definition of ‘virtual’ is near and reality is what we experience as human beings. So the term ‘virtual reality’ basically means ‘near-reality’. You would be presented with a version of reality that isn’t really there, but from your perspective it would be perceived as real. Something we would refer to as a virtual reality. Virtual world entails presenting our senses with a computer generated virtual environment that we can explore in some fashion. From trainee fighter pilots to medical applications trainee surgeons, virtual reality allows us to take virtual risks in order to gain real world experience. Virtual reality is the creation of a virtual environment presented to our senses in such a way that we experience it as if we were really there. The technology is becoming cheaper and more widespread. We can expect to see many more innovative uses for the technology in the future and perhaps a fundamental way in which we communicate and work thanks to the possibilities of virtual reality. 

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How 3-D Graphics Work

You're probably reading this on the screen of a computer monitor -- a display that has two real dimensions, height and width. But when you look at a movie like "Toy Story II" or play a game like TombRaider, you see a window into a three-dimensional world. One of the truly amazing things about this window is that the world you see can be the world we live in, the world we will live in tomorrow, or a world that lives only in the minds of a movie’s or game's creators. And all of these worlds can appear on the same screen you use for writing a report or keeping track of a stock portfolio.

How does your computer trick your eyes into thinking that the flat screen extends deep into a series of rooms? How do game programmers convince you that you're seeing real characters move around in a real landscape? We will tell you about some of the visual tricks 3-D graphic designers use, and how hardware designers make the tricks happen so fast that they seem like a movie that reacts to your every move.

What Makes a Picture 3-D?

A picture that has or appears to have height, width and depth is three-dimensional (or 3-D). A picture that has height and width but no depth is two-dimensional (or 2-D). Some pictures are 2-D on purpose. Think about the international symbols that indicate which door leads to a restroom, for example. The symbols are designed so that you can recognize them at a glance. That’s why they use only the most basic shapes. Additional information on the symbols might try to tell you what sort of clothes the little man or woman is wearing, the color of their hair, whether they get to the gym on a regular basis, and so on, but all of that extra information would tend to make it take longer for you to get the basic information out of the symbol: which restroom is which. That's one of the basic differences between how 2-D and 3-D graphics are used: 2-D graphics are good at communicating something simple, very quickly. 3-D graphics tell a more complicated story, but have to carry much more information to do it.

For example, triangles have three lines and three angles -- all that's needed to tell the story of a triangle. A pyramid, however is a 3-D structure with four triangular sides. Note that it takes five lines and six angles to tell the story of a pyramid -- nearly twice the information required to tell the story of a triangle.

For hundreds of years, artists have known some of the tricks that can make a flat, 2-D painting look like a window into the real, 3-D world. You can see some of these on a photograph that you might scan and view on your computer monitor: Objects appear smaller when they're farther away; when objects close to the camera are in focus, objects farther away are fuzzy; colors tend to be less vibrant as they move farther away. When we talk about 3-D graphics on computers today, though, we're not talking about still photographs -- we're talking about pictures that move.

If making a 2-D picture into a 3-D image requires adding a lot of information, then the step from a 3-D still picture to images that move realistically requires far more. Part of the problem is that we’ve gotten spoiled. We expect a high degree of realism in everything we see. In the mid-1970s, a game like "Pong" could impress people with its on-screen graphics. Today, we compare game screens to DVD movies, and want the games to be as smooth and detailed as what we see in the movie theater. That poses a challenge for 3-D graphics on PCs, Macintoshes, and, increasingly, game consoles like the Dreamcast and the Playstation II.

What Are 3-D Graphics?

For many of us, games on a computer or advanced game system are the most common ways we see 3-D graphics or 3D augmented reality . These games, or movies made with computer-generated images, have to go through three major steps to create and present a realistic 3-D scene:

Creating a virtual 3-D world.

Determining what part of the world will be shown on the screen.

Determining how every pixel on the screen will look so that the whole image appears as realistic as possible.

Creating a Virtual 3-D World

A virtual 3-D world isn't the same thing as one picture of that world. This is true of our real world also. Take a very small part of the real world -- your hand and a desktop under it. Your hand has qualities that determine how it can move and how it can look. The finger joints bend toward the palm, not away from it. If you slap your hand on the desktop, the desktop doesn't splash -- it's always solid and it's always hard. Your hand can't go through the desktop. You can't prove that these things are true by looking at any single picture. But no matter how many pictures you take, you will always see that the finger joints bend only toward the palm, and the desktop is always solid, not liquid, and hard, not soft. That's because in the real world, this is the way hands are and the way they will always behave. The objects in a virtual 3-D world, though, don’t exist in nature, like your hand. They are totally synthetic. The only properties they have are given to them by software. Programmers must use special tools and define a virtual 3-D world with great care so that everything in it always behaves in a certain way.

What Part of the Virtual World Shows on the Screen?

At any given moment, the screen shows only a tiny part of the virtual 3-D world created for a computer game. What is shown on the screen is determined by a combination of the way the world is defined, where you choose to go and which way you choose to look. No matter where you go -- forward or backward, up or down, left or right -- the virtual 3-D world around you determines what you will see from that position looking in that direction. And what you see has to make sense from one scene to the next. If you're looking at an object from the same distance, regardless of direction, it should look the same height. Every object should look and move in such a way as to convince you that it always has the same mass, that it's just as hard or soft, as rigid or pliable, and so on.

Programmers who write computer games put enormous effort into defining 3-D worlds so that you can wander in them without encountering anything that makes you think, “That couldn't happen in this world!" The last thing you want to see is two solid objects that can go right through each other. That’s a harsh reminder that everything you’re seeing is make-believe.

The third step involves at least as much computing as the other two steps and has to happen in real time for games and videos. We'll take a longer look at it next.

How to Make It Look Like the Real Thing

No matter how large or rich the virtual 3-D world, a computer can depict that world only by putting pixels on the 2-D screen. This section will focus on just how what you see on the screen is made to look realistic, and especially on how scenes are made to look as close as possible to what you see in the real world. First we'll look at how a single stationary object is made to look realistic. Then we'll answer the same question for an entire scene. Finally, we'll consider what a computer has to do to show full-motion scenes of realistic images moving at realistic speeds.

A number of image parts go into making an object seem real. Among the most important of these are shapes, surface textures, lighting, perspective, depth of field and anti-aliasing.

Shapes

When we look out our windows, we see scenes made up of all sorts of shapes, with straight lines and curves in many sizes and combinations. Similarly, when we look at a 3-D graphical image on our computer monitor, we see images made up of a variety of shapes, although most of them are made up of straight lines. We see squares, rectangles, parallelograms, circles and rhomboids, but most of all we see triangles. However, in order to build images that look as though they have the smooth curves often found in nature, some of the shapes must be very small, and a complex image -- say, a human body -- might require thousands of these shapes to be put together into a structure called a wireframe. At this stage the structure might be recognizable as the symbol of whatever it will eventually picture, but the next major step is important: The wireframe has to be given a surface.

Surface Textures

When we meet a surface in the real world, we can get information about it in two key ways. We can look at it, sometimes from several angles, and we can touch it to see whether it's hard or soft. In a 3-D graphic image, however, we can only look at the surface to get all the information possible. All that information breaks down into three areas:

Color: What color is it? Is it the same color all over?

Texture: Does it appear to be smooth, or does it have lines, bumps, craters or some other irregularity on the surface?

Reflectance: How much light does it reflect? Are reflections of other items in the surface sharp or fuzzy?

One way to make an image look "real" is to have a wide variety of these three features across the different parts of the image. Look around you now: Your computer keyboard has a different color/texture/reflectance than your desktop, which has a different color/texture/reflectance than your arm. For realistic color, it’s important for the computer to be able to choose from millions of different colors for the pixels making up an image. Variety in texture comes both from mathematical models for surfaces ranging from frog skin to Jell-o gelatin to stored “texture maps” that are applied to surfaces. We also associate qualities that we can't see -- soft, hard, warm, cold -- with particular combinations of color, texture and reflectance. If one of them is wrong, the illusion of reality is shattered.

Lighting and Perspective

When you walk into a room, you turn on a light. You probably don't spend a lot of time thinking about the way the light comes from the bulb or tube and spreads around the room. But the people making 3-D graphics have to think about it, because all the surfaces surrounding the wireframes have to be lit from somewhere. One technique, called ray-tracing, plots the path that imaginary light rays take as they leave the bulb, bounce off of mirrors, walls and other reflecting surfaces, and finally land on items at different intensities from varying angles. It's complicated enough when you think about the rays from a single light bulb, but most rooms have multiple light sources -- several lamps, ceiling fixtures, windows, candles and so on.

Lighting plays a key role in two effects that give the appearance of weight and solidity to objects: shading and shadows. The first, shading, takes place when the light shining on an object is stronger on one side than on the other. This shading is what makes a ball look round, high cheekbones seem striking and the folds in a blanket appear deep and soft. These differences in light intensity work with shape to reinforce the illusion that an object has depth as well as height and width. The illusion of weight comes from the second effect -- shadows.

Solid bodies cast shadows when a light shines on them. You can see this when you observe the shadow that a sundial or a tree casts onto a sidewalk. And because we’re used to seeing real objects and people cast shadows, seeing the shadows in a 3-D image reinforces the illusion that we’re looking through a window into the real world, rather than at a screen of mathematically generated shapes.

Perspective

Perspective is one of those words that sounds technical but that actually describes a simple effect everyone has seen. If you stand on the side of a long, straight road and look into the distance, it appears as if the two sides of the road come together in a point at the horizon. Also, if trees are standing next to the road, the trees farther away will look smaller than the trees close to you. As a matter of fact, the trees will look like they are converging on the point formed by the side of the road. When all of the objects in a scene look like they will eventually converge at a single point in the distance, that's perspective. There are variations, but most 3-D graphics use the "single point perspective" just described.

In the illustration, the hands are separate, but most scenes feature some items in front of, and partially blocking the view of, other items. For these scenes the software not only must calculate the relative sizes of the items but also must know which item is in front and how much of the other items it hides. The most common technique for calculating these factors is the Z-Buffer. The Z-buffer gets its name from the common label for the axis, or imaginary line, going from the screen back through the scene to the horizon. (There are two other common axes to consider: the x-axis, which measures the scene from side to side, and the y-axis, which measures the scene from top to bottom.)

The Z-buffer assigns to each polygon a number based on how close an object containing the polygon is to the front of the scene. Generally, lower numbers are assigned to items closer to the screen, and higher numbers are assigned to items closer to the horizon. For example, a 16-bit Z-buffer would assign the number -32,768 to an object rendered as close to the screen as possible and 32,767 to an object that is as far away as possible.

In the real world, our eyes can’t see objects behind others, so we don’t have the problem of figuring out what we should be seeing. But the computer faces this problem constantly and solves it in a straightforward way. As each object is created, its Z-value is compared to that of other objects that occupy the same x- and y-values. The object with the lowest z-value is fully rendered, while objects with higher z-values aren’t rendered where they intersect. The result ensures that we don’t see background items appearing through the middle of characters in the foreground. Since the z-buffer is employed before objects are fully rendered, pieces of the scene that are hidden behind characters or objects don’t have to be rendered at all. This speeds up graphics performance. Next, we'll look at the depth of field element.

Depth of Field

Another optical effect successfully used to create 3-D is depth of field. Using our example of the trees beside the road, as that line of trees gets smaller, another interesting thing happens. If you look at the trees close to you, the trees farther away will appear to be out of focus. And this is especially true when you're looking at a photograph or movie of the trees. Film directors and computer animators use this depth of field effect for two purposes. The first is to reinforce the illusion of depth in the scene you're watching. It's certainly possible for the computer to make sure that every item in a scene, no matter how near or far it's supposed to be, is perfectly in focus. Since we're used to seeing the depth of field effect, though, having items in focus regardless of distance would seem foreign and would disturb the illusion of watching a scene in the real world.

The second reason directors use depth of field is to focus your attention on the items or actors they feel are most important. To direct your attention to the heroine of a movie, for example, a director might use a "shallow depth of field," where only the actor is in focus. A scene that's designed to impress you with the grandeur of nature, on the other hand, might use a "deep depth of field" to get as much as possible in focus and noticeable.

Anti-aliasing

A technique that also relies on fooling the eye is anti-aliasing. Digital graphics systems are very good at creating lines that go straight up and down the screen, or straight across. But when curves or diagonal lines show up (and they show up pretty often in the real world), the computer might produce lines that resemble stair steps instead of smooth flows. So to fool your eye into seeing a smooth curve or line, the computer can add graduated shades of the color in the line to the pixels surrounding the line. These "grayed-out" pixels will fool your eye into thinking that the jagged stair steps are gone. This process of adding additional colored pixels to fool the eye is called anti-aliasing, and it is one of the techniques that separates computer-generated 3-D graphics from those generated by hand. Keeping up with the lines as they move through fields of color, and adding the right amount of "anti-jaggy" color, is yet another complex task that a computer must handle as it creates 3-D animation on your computer monitor.

Making 3-D Graphics Move

So far, we've been looking at the sorts of things that make any digital image seem more realistic, whether the image is a single "still" picture or part of an animated sequence. But during an animated sequence, programmers and designers will use even more tricks to give the appearance of "live action" rather than of computer-generated images.

How many frames per second?

When you go to see a movie at the local theater, a sequence of images called frames runs in front of your eyes at a rate of 24 frames per second. Since your retina will retain an image for a bit longer than 1/24th of a second, most people's eyes will blend the frames into a single, continuous image of movement and action.

If you think of this from the other direction, it means that each frame of a motion picture is a photograph taken at an exposure of 1/24 of a second. That's much longer than the exposures taken for "stop action" photography, in which runners and other objects in motion seem frozen in flight. As a result, if you look at a single frame from a movie about racing, you see that some of the cars are "blurred" because they moved during the time that the camera shutter was open. This blurring of things that are moving fast is something that we're used to seeing, and it's part of what makes an image look real to us when we see it on a screen.

However, since digital 3-D images are not photographs at all, no blurring occurs when an object moves during a frame. To make images look more realistic, blurring has to be explicitly added by programmers. Some designers feel that "overcoming" this lack of natural blurring requires more than 30 frames per second, and have pushed their games to display 60 frames per second. While this allows each individual image to be rendered in great detail, and movements to be shown in smaller increments, it dramatically increases the number of frames that must be rendered for a given sequence of action. As an example, think of a chase that lasts six and one-half minutes. A motion picture would require 24 (frames per second) x 60 (seconds) x 6.5 (minutes) or 9,360 frames for the chase. A digital 3-D image at 60 frames per second would require 60 x 60 x 6.5, or 23,400 frames for the same length of time.

Creative Blurring

The blurring that programmers add to boost realism in a moving image is called "motion blur" or "spatial anti-aliasing." If you've ever turned on the "mouse trails" feature of Windows, you've used a very crude version of a portion of this technique. Copies of the moving object are left behind in its wake, with the copies growing ever less distinct and intense as the object moves farther away. The length of the trail of the object, how quickly the copies fade away and other details will vary depending on exactly how fast the object is supposed to be moving, how close to the viewer it is, and the extent to which it is the focus of attention. As you can see, there are a lot of decisions to be made and many details to be programmed in making an object appear to move realistically.

There are other parts of an image where the precise rendering of a computer must be sacrificed for the sake of realism. This applies both to still and moving images. Reflections are a good example. You've seen the images of chrome-surfaced cars and spaceships perfectly reflecting everything in the scene. While the chrome-covered images are tremendous demonstrations of ray-tracing, most of us don't live in chrome-plated worlds. Wooden furniture, marble floors and polished metal all reflect images, though not as perfectly as a smooth mirror. The reflections in these surfaces must be blurred -- with each surface receiving a different blur -- so that the surfaces surrounding the central players in a digital drama provide a realistic stage for the action.

Fluid Motion for Us Is Hard Work for the Computer

All the factors we've discussed so far add complexity to the process of putting a 3-D image on the screen. It's harder to define and create the object in the first place, and it's harder to render it by generating all the pixels needed to display the image. The triangles and polygons of the wireframe, the texture of the surface, and the rays of light coming from various light sources and reflecting from multiple surfaces must all be calculated and assembled before the software begins to tell the computer how to paint the pixels on the screen. You might think that the hard work of computing would be over when the painting begins, but it's at the painting, or rendering, level that the numbers begin to add up.

Today, a screen resolution of 1024 x 768 defines the lowest point of "high-resolution." That means that there are 786,432 picture elements, or pixels, to be painted on the screen. If there are 32 bits of color available, multiplying by 32 shows that 25,165,824 bits have to be dealt with to make a single image. Moving at a rate of 60 frames per second demands that the computer handle 1,509,949,440 bits of information every second just to put the image onto the screen. And this is completely separate from the work the computer has to do to decide about the content, colors, shapes, lighting and everything else about the image so that the pixels put on the screen actually show the right image. When you think about all the processing that has to happen just to get the image painted, it's easy to understand why graphics display boards are moving more and more of the graphics processing away from the computer's central processing unit (CPU). The CPU needs all the help it can get.

Transforms and Processors: Work, Work, Work

Looking at the number of information bits that go into the makeup of a screen only gives a partial picture of how much processing is involved. To get some inkling of the total processing load, we have to talk about a mathematical process called a transform. Transforms are used whenever we change the way we look at something. A picture of a car that moves toward us, for example, uses transforms to make the car appear larger as it moves. Another example of a transform is when the 3-D world created by a computer program has to be "flattened" into 2-D for display on a screen. Let's look at the math involved with this transform -- one that's used in every frame of a 3-D game -- to get an idea of what the computer is doing. We'll use some numbers that are made up but that give an idea of the staggering amount of mathematics involved in generating one screen. Don't worry about learning to do the math. That has become the computer's problem. This is all intended to give you some appreciation for the heavy-lifting your computer does when you run a game.

The first part of the process has several important variables:

X = 758 -- the height of the "world" we're looking at.

Y = 1024 -- the width of the world we're looking at

Z = 2 -- the depth (front to back) of the world we're looking at

Sx = height of our window into the world

Sy - width of our window into the world

Sz = a depth variable that determines which objects are visible in front of other, hidden objects

D = .75 -- the distance between our eye and the window in this imaginary world.

First, we calculate the size of the windows into the imaginary world.

Now that the window size has been calculated, a perspective transform is used to move a step closer to projecting the world onto a monitor screen. In this next step, we add some more variables.

So, a point (X, Y, Z, 1.0) in the three-dimensional imaginary world would have transformed position of (X', Y', Z', W'), which we get by the following equations:

At this point, another transform must be applied before the image can be projected onto the monitor's screen, but you begin to see the level of computation involved -- and this is all for a single vector (line) in the image! Imagine the calculations in a complex scene with many objects and characters, and imagine doing all this 60 times a second. Aren't you glad someone invented computers?

In the example below, you see an animated sequence showing a walk through the new How Stuff Works office. First, notice that this sequence is much simpler than most scenes in a 3-D game. There are no opponents jumping out from behind desks, no missiles or spears sailing through the air, no tooth-gnashing demons materializing in cubicles. From the "what's-going-to-be-in-the-scene" point of view, this is simple animation. Even this simple sequence, though, deals with many of the issues we've seen so far. The walls and furniture have texture that covers wireframe structures. Rays representing lighting provide the basis for shadows. Also, as the point of view changes during the walk through the office, notice how some objects become visible around corners and appear from behind walls -- you're seeing the effects of the z-buffer calculations. As all of these elements come into play before the image can actually be rendered onto the monitor, it's pretty obvious that even a powerful modern CPU can use some help doing all the processing required for 3-D games and graphics. That's where graphics co-processor boards come in.

How Graphics Boards Help

Since the early days of personal computers, most graphics boards have been translators, taking the fully developed image created by the computer's CPU and translating it into the electrical impulses required to drive the computer's monitor. This approach works, but all of the processing for the image is done by the CPU -- along with all the processing for the sound, player input (for games) and the interrupts for the system. Because of everything the computer must do to make modern 3-D games and multi-media presentations happen, it's easy for even the fastest modern processors to become overworked and unable to serve the various requirements of the software in real time. It's here that the graphics co-processor helps: it splits the work with the CPU so that the total multi-media experience can move at an acceptable speed.

As we've seen, the first step in building a 3-D digital image is creating a wireframe world of triangles and polygons. The wireframe world is then transformed from the three-dimensional mathematical world into a set of patterns that will display on a 2-D screen. The transformed image is then covered with surfaces, or rendered, lit from some number of sources, and finally translated into the patterns that display on a monitor's screen. The most common graphics co-processors in the current generation of graphics display boards, however, take the task of rendering away from the CPU after the wireframe has been created and transformed into a 2-D set of polygons. The graphics co-processor found in boards like the VooDoo3 and TNT2 Ultra takes over from the CPU at this stage. This is an important step, but graphics processors on the cutting edge of technology are designed to relieve the CPU at even earlier points in the process.

One approach to taking more responsibility from the CPU is done by the GeForce 256 from Nvidia. In addition to the rendering done by earlier-generation boards, the GeForce 256 adds transforming the wireframe models from 3-D mathematics space to 2-D display space as well as the work needed to show lighting. Since both transforms and ray-tracing involve serious floating point mathematics (mathematics that involve fractions, called "floating point" because the decimal point can move as needed to provide high precision), these tasks take a serious processing burden from the CPU. And because the graphics processor doesn't have to cope with many of the tasks expected of the CPU, it can be designed to do those mathematical tasks very quickly.

The new Voodoo 5 from 3dfx takes over another set of tasks from the CPU. 3dfx calls the technology the T-buffer. This technology focuses on improving the rendering process rather than adding additional tasks to the processor. The T-buffer is designed to improve anti-aliasing by rendering up to four copies of the same image, each slightly offset from the others, then combining them to slightly blur the edges of objects and defeat the "jaggies" that can plague computer-generated images. The same technique is used to generate motion-blur, blurred shadows and depth-of-field focus blurring. All of these produce smoother-looking, more realistic images that graphics designers want. The object of the Voodoo 5 design is to do full-screen anti-aliasing while still maintaining fast frame rates.

Computer graphics still have a ways to go before we see routine, constant generation and presentation of truly realistic moving images. But graphics have advanced tremendously since the days of 80 columns and 25 lines of monochrome text. The result is that millions of people enjoy games and simulations with today's technology. And new 3-D processors will come much closer to making us feel we're really exploring other worlds and experiencing things we'd never dare try in real life. Major advances in PC graphics hardware seem to happen about every six months. Software improves more slowly. It's still clear that, like the Internet, computer graphics are going to become an increasingly attractive alternative to TV.