Casual Introduction:
I have always loved technology and its applications, and have always been an avid reader, gamer, and fantasy/sci-fi geek. Finding escape in worlds other than the real one is the basis of most of my favorite pastimes, so of course when I heard of the Oculus Rift and its promise to make those fictional world, where I sometimes felt just as much at home as in the real world, visible not only to my mind's eye but to my physical eyes as well, I was captivated.
Knowing that the field of virtual reality allows one to mesh imagination with reality, I could go on and on about virtual reality games and their future as the world's only gaming medium, but that would end up as nothing but a summarization of other people's research in my voice. No, for my senior thesis I wanted to do something (at least relatively) new. Architecture, another lifelong passion of mine, and virtual/augmented reality are a winning combination that has not, in my opinion, received enough attention. My senior thesis will focus on the impact that VR/AR technologies will have on the architectural design process and architectural designs themselves as VR/AR technologies enter the commercial (and eventually the consumer) mainstream.
Dramatic Introduction to Virtual Reality:
In these times, the world of technology is a world of literally infinite possibilities. Technology has advanced to the point that we can create whole worlds out of zeroes and ones, worlds that, soon enough, we will find difficult to distinguish from the real one by the believability of graphics alone.
Emerging virtual reality technologies are much like good books in their capacities to transport us to completely imaginary worlds, but are polar opposites to their ancestors of paper and ink in the way that they go about it. The words in a book are symbolic representations of settings and concepts, of sensory input, that are in turn interpreted and given meaning only in the reader's mind. However, a true virtual reality is just as its name suggests. True virtual realities are worlds in which a person can be
directly immersed, not through the use of his imagination and his skills of interpretation, but with his physical senses. They are worlds that are said to be imaginary but that can actually be seen. Virtual reality technologies are in a nutshell the best demonstration since the invention of the written word that human creativity cannot be bound by a physical world.
