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authors
Wexelblat, A. (Ed.)
year
1993
title
Virtual Reality - Applications and Explorations
source
Academic Press Professional
summary
Virtual and Artificial Reality have become in the last few years one of the major new hype words. Subsequently there has been a plethora of glossy books and droll conference proceedings describing various systems and hardware implementation problems. As has always been discovered in computer science the major effort is in designing and building the software applications. Alan's aim has been to ignore the hardware side and concentrate on the far larger and almost impossible problem of what to do with it. This book is a collection of ten essays trying to look slightly into the future and define actual uses for Virtual Reality kits rather than showing off expensive hardware. This has resulted in a series of topics, each defines a different interface problem between the user and machine which may have some solution by using Virtual Reality. Even though the topics vary, at times drastically, Alan has managed to use editorial selection very well intertwining them into a reasonably coherent whole. The scope is too large for any single book to cover in any detail and as is inevitable important topics for example military and medicine have been excluded. Topics chosen range from traditional computer information database visualisation to planetary exploration to the Virtual Reality version of the music video and literacy in cyberspace.