title: Virtual reality: past, present and future.
abstract: This report provides a short survey of the field of virtual reality, highlighting application domains, technological requirements, and currently available solutions. The report is organized as follows: section 1 presents the background and motivation of virtual environment research and identifies typical application domain, section 2 discusses the characteristics a virtual reality system must have in order to exploit the perceptual and spatial skills of users, section 3 surveys current input/output devices for virtual reality, section 4 surveys current software approaches to support the creation of virtual reality systems, and section 5 summarizes the report.
authors.affiliation: CRS4-Center for Advanced Studies, Research and Development in Sardinia, Cagliari, Italy.
authors.forename: E
authors.initials: E
authors.lastname: Gobbetti
authors.forename: R
authors.initials: R
authors.lastname: Scateni
mesh_terms: D003198:Computer Simulation / Q000639:trends*; D005544:Forecasting; D006801:Humans; D012106:Research; D012985:Software Design; D014584:User-Computer Interface