Bringing VR to the desktop: are you game?

Abstract

The goal of bringing photorealistic, real-time technology to desktop computers has challenged the virtual reality (VR) community. Some day, we will not need to travel across the globe to visit historically significant places; we'll simply select them from an interactive encyclopedia and virtually visit them from our classrooms and living rooms. Imaging technologies have advanced in great leaps and bounds, and most of this technology is readily available to average consumers today. In the forefront, video game companies have made great strides in this area. They have spent millions of dollars developing real-time 3D graphics engines that focus on a series of new core technologies specifically dealing with presenting complex 3D environments, comprised of textured and shaded polygon-based worlds, to a low-end audience running standard personal computers. Taking all this quickly-evolving technology into consideration, Digitalo Studios and the Virtual Systems Laboratory in Japan developed two projects using 3D video-game engine technologies, generating high-resolution, real-time 3D imagery for photorealistic walk-throughs of the Florida Everglades and the Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris. The latter, nicknamed the Virtual Reality Notre Dame (VRND) Project, is a multi-user environment that is accessible to the public via the Internet.