Virtual reality in the e-Society

Abstract

This special issue explores the extent to which virtual reality (VR) is affecting the creation of an electronic society. E-Society is a broad term used to describe a research area covering aspects of digital technologies for large user communities. Recent years have seen the emergence of various electronic services in an attempt to facilitate everyday life and improve the way common tasks are being carried out. E-business and e-learning were of the first areas of e-Society to emerge. E-business refers to the use of information and communication technologies to facilitate transactions between businesses and customers or between businesses. Online shops, often called virtual shops offer customers the possibility to buy products through Internet. E-learning on the other hand encompasses technologies that allow teachers and students to interact either synchronously or asynchronously. E-government is another application of ICT for the benefit of e-Society, aiming to digitise services, informational or transactional offered to citizens and businesses and improve the exchange of information between governmental bodies. E-democracy is tightly coupled with e-voting, e-participation and e-inclusion, and aims to ameliorate and enhance democratic procedures, by providing the means necessary to citizens to participate in decision making and monitor governmental processes. Lastly, e-health describes the use of digital technologies in the health care sector. Services provided range from telemedicine and collaborative systems for patient diagnosis to online systems for medical records. As described, the term e-Society covers a wide range of applications from e-government, e-democracy, and e-business to e-learning and e-health. Although the term ‘‘virtual’’ is used in this context, such as for example in ‘‘virtual e-shops’’ or ‘‘virtual learning environments’’, it has to be stressed that it is has little to do with VR technologies. It is rather used to denote the fact that these ‘‘virtual’’ systems do not occupy space in the real-world. User interfaces for these systems usually fall into the typical windowing, 2D paradigm; thus the potential for using VR technologies in an emerging e-Society is enormous. VR technologies for visualising remotely health data, creating online communities, developing online stores or educating groups of people can contribute to the growth of the e-Society by making it more tangible and real for the users. In order for VR to contribute to the creation and advancement of e-Society, a number of issues have to be tackled. A successful VR system has to find a balance between the hardware requirements, user interaction methods, content presentation and the effort required for development and maintenance. Hardware requirements define to a large degree the extent to which an end-user can afford to execute the VR system at her home. VR systems span from online, G. D. Magoulas (&) School of Computer Science and Information Systems, Birkbeck College, University of London, Malet Street, London WC1E 7HX, UK e-mail: gmagoulas@dcs.bbk.ac.uk