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Virtual reality (VR) (Zhao, 2017) was first proposed by Lanier in 1989. Virtual reality is to generate a realistic three-dimensional perceptual world of sight, sound, touch, or smell that allows users to navigate and interact with virtual world objects from their vision using natural skills and certain devices.
As shown in Figure 1, virtual reality has three basic characteristics (Burdea & Coiffet, 2003): multisensory, immersion, and interactivity. Multisensory refers to visual perception, auditory, force, haptic, kinesthetic perception, and taste and smell perception. Immersion refers to the degree of realism the user feels in the virtual environment. The more real, the more immersion, the greater the sensation that they are in the real world. Finally, interactivity refers to the extent to which the user can manipulate objects in the virtual environment and receive feedback from the virtual environment.
Figure 1. Three characteristics of virtual reality
As shown in Figure 2, a virtual reality system comprises five main components that explain interactions with the virtual environment.
Figure 2. Components of virtual reality
The participant activates input facilities, such as helmets and gloves, to provide input signals for the computer. The virtual reality software receives the input signals from trackers and sensors. It interprets them, updates the virtual environment database, adjusts the virtual environment scene, and passes the 3D image of the viewpoint and other information to the corresponding output devices (such as helmet display and data gloves) to give the user a virtualized, sensory effect.
Virtual reality technology comprises elements such as graphics and image technology, multimedia technology, interaction technology, network technology, 3D display technology, and simulation technology (Li et al., 2015). Virtual reality technology uses computers to generate realistic 3D visual, auditory, olfactory, and other senses. Through devices, it places the user in the 3D environment the computer represents so that the user can naturally experience and interact with the virtual reality world. It creates a sense of “immersion.” Virtual reality technology creates virtual reality using computers. Virtual reality is one of the key development disciplines of the 21st century and one of the most important technologies affecting people’s lives.
Virtual reality technology has progressed rapidly with information technology advances. It has been widely adopted in the military (Xu et al., 2017), education (Chen et al., 2020, Yan et al., 2019, McGovern et al., 2020), medicine (Chen et al., 2020, Shen et al., 2020), film and television (Li, 2022), business (Lei & Zhou, 2020), restoration of case scenes (Li et al., 2015), psychology (Hu et al., 2020), entertainment (He, 2022), engineering training (Wei et al., 2018, Sun et al., 2019), scientific research (Luo et al., 2021), manufacturing (Sekaran et al., 2021, Chen et al., 2021), and other fields. For example, virtual reality allows users to enjoy an immersive gaming experience from a first perspective in terms of entertainment, such as watching a movie on the moon or performing with a singer on stage. In terms of tourism, we can create immersive tourism locations through virtual reality, and users can choose locations anytime and anywhere for virtual tourism to achieve the feel of “mix the spurious with the genuine.” Virtual medicine can assist real-life anatomy and surgery by constantly simulating anatomy, saving medical resources, and avoiding surgical errors.