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Some of the more notable applications of virtual reality are:
- The training of employees on virtual production control systems. Any mistakes made by the employees are harmless as opposed to making those mistakes in the real world, which would damage expensive machinery and cost large sums of money.
- As therapy for the treatment of people with phobias. For example, people with a fear of heights (acrophobics) are placed in a simulated reality where they ride an elevator to the top of a tall virtual building. This eventually acclimates them to the sensory experience of heights in a totally safe environment.
- For the training of military personnel so that they can learn to fly high speed jets or operate other complex military machinery.
- Doctors can practice performing surgery on virtual hearts and other simulated body parts; allowing them to make harmless mistakes instead of endangering the lives of real human beings.
- Real estate agents can give remote tours of properties over the Internet, allowing prospective home buyers to shop for houses without ever leaving their home.
Virtual reality is another field that will be vastly more important to our daily lives in the near future. Creative and innovative new ways of visualizing data and finding patterns will become available to us, thanks to virtual reality. For example, inert and hard to understand large data sets can be converted to virtual cities or other graphical representations of the data that are more amenable to the human eye and brain. The field of entertainment holds tremendous promise for bringing virtual reality directly into our lives, especially in the areas of television programming and of video games.
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