October 1997, Volume 3, No. 10 Manufacturer's Library

Working with Virtual Reality, by William Sherman and Alan Craig, Morgan Kaufmann Publishers, 400 pages, $59.95, ISBN 1-55860-353-0 While virtual reality has been hyped for several years as everything from an entertainment medium to the next evolution of human consciousness, its immediate uses as a way to examine and explore information have been largely ignored in the popular press. In fact, VR techniques have proven to be enormously useful in visualizing complex information for many applications, such as modeling industrial or architectural designs, training operators without putting expensive equipment at risk, and facilitating concurrent engineering. This book explores the practical applications of VR, both as they currently exist and as they will develop in the next few years. It begins with a history of information presentation, demonstrating the basic problems that VR has recently been employed to solve; continues with a technical overview of VR fundamentals, focusing on how VR can be applied to visualization; and finishes with a survey of current VR projects from a variety of disciplines. Descriptions of the projects are detailed, echoing the structure of the book with discussions of what was used before VR, why VR became necessary, how VR was incorporated, what was accomplished, and what is planned for the future. Sherman and Craig are with the National Center for Supercomputing Applications.

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