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Displays Games Technology

Virtual Reality: Purpose Beyond Gaming 72

Posted by Soulskill from the advertisers-will-invade-soon dept.
An anonymous reader writes "Virtual reality tech is getting a ton of attention for what it can do to video games. But the technology itself isn't limited to games — just as Kinect was hijacked and used for myriad other purposes, so will VR be broadly adapted. This article goes into some of the applications: 'An elderly woman in a retirement home recently used an Oculus to explore a garden and walk stairs again. This simple environment brought her to tears. Work is also being done to help PTSD sufferers deal with their trauma by replicating the scene within virtual reality and there is great interest in using a similar approach for other conditions like amnesia, Alzheimer's and dementia. ... It's now possible for museum spaces and schools to teleport students to specific moments in history, to allow them to experience being executed by a guillotine, take tours of space or even explore the depths of the ocean.' What other VR uses can you foresee?"
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Virtual Reality: Purpose Beyond Gaming More

Virtual Reality: Purpose Beyond Gaming

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  • Nice summary. (Score:5, Funny)

    by Leonard Fedorov ( 1139357 ) on Wednesday April 30, 2014 @05:29AM (#46876673)

    Good thing it mentioned the anecdote about the eldery woman twice, otherwise I might have forgotten it. Clearly no one is proof reading these...

  • virtual sex - what else? (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward

    now you can fulfill all your pedophile, nekrophile, sodomy, heterosexual ..... - phantasies without commiting a crime.
    this will change masturbation forever.

  • Can the story be changed to be from the Redundancy of Derpartment Redundancy?

  • Something designed for games can be re-purposed for something else? Wow... Next you'll be telling me that new Internet thing with all the porn can also host cat videos.

  • Flight simulators. Of course, we've been using VR for these for decades, so it's not exactly news..

  • Any use of VR is fine, with gaming, medical and tourism being the most amazing from my perspective.
    That said, I would hate to see it become predominantly a platform for social networks as Zuckerberg has envisioned. That stuff has the potential to ruin the technology by integrating itself too deeply.

  • I hope it gets broader adoption than Kinect or those Wii sports novelties.

  • There have been many sci-fi novels about virtual worlds and their economy, and they inspire a lot of people. I have spoken to people eager to "relocate" into virtual reality with most of their business and even personal life. I guess it's because virtual worlds simplify or ignore many boring details of life.

    Even the current, far from perfect, simulations like Second Life, WoW or Lineage have so many fans that it shows the potential for adoption.

    If Facebook and other vendors make it right, it can be a sm

  • CAD, and Maintenance Manuals (Score:3)

    by Grey Geezer ( 2699315 ) on Wednesday April 30, 2014 @08:01AM (#46877577)

    are a couple of the more practical, less warm and fuzzy, places where I thought VR would have been employed much sooner.

    • Maintenance manuals? I could see AR being wonderful for those, but VR?I don't see it adding much beyond what having a rotatable 3D model of the system on screen in an electronic manual would offer. Potentially less actually, since you can't glance at the manual while working.

      • You aren't thinking big enough. When a really big machine is scheduled to go down for PM, it would be helpful for the team to do a "walk-through" before hand. Electricians, machinists, pipe-fitters, and millwrights might be able to pre-plan and coordinate all of their assignments prior to the shut-down. New members of the team could be brought up to speed pre-shutdown also.

        • An excellent thought, though I think at that point you've departed from anything that could reasonably be referred to as a repair manual. Repair simulator maybe.

    • Maintenance manuals are a good idea, but VR editions would probably cost more time and money than a company is willing to spend, especially when they'd rather have to buy something new than fix something old.

  • is /. editors. Maybe I could go to a virtual world where /. has real editors?

  • I can imagine great potential for using this in conjunction with the Ludovico Technique [wikipedia.org]

  • We know what its really all about (Score:5, Funny)

    by voss ( 52565 ) on Wednesday April 30, 2014 @08:40AM (#46877893)

    *band if you please*

    The Oculus Rift is really great....FOR PORN!
    You can do all kind of advanced graphics... FOR PORN!
    Explore whole new worlds...FOR PORN
    Then return safe and sound FOR PORN

    The Oculus Rift is for porn
    The Oculus Rift is for porn
    Grab your RIFT and double click for PORN! PORN! PORN!

  • Microscopy: put cameras and microphones on a very small physical avatar (say, the size of a Lego minifig). Walk/drive it around in a real miniature environment-- say, a Lego city built on a tabletop, with real people also in the room. Enjoy. Refine. Make something cool. Macroscopy: place cameras and microphones widely spaced apart and high above the ground-- on the side of a skyscraper, a cell tower, or suspended from a blimp. Or on the ISS. Figure out how to incorporate something like looking-arou

    • Microscopy: put cameras and microphones on a very small physical avatar (say, the size of a Lego minifig). Walk/drive it around in a real miniature environment-- say, a Lego city built on a tabletop, with real people also in the room. Enjoy. Refine. Make something cool.

      That... actually sounds like a metric shit-tonne of fun. Like MarioKart meets Minecraft meets Honey, I Shrunk the Kids.

  • ...just a view of the basket that your head is going to drop into? Maybe there is an option to lay down face up towards the sky.

  • One word answer: Holodeck.

    (...or at the very least, the first baby steps towards such a thing...)

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