Understanding Virtual Reality

PART I WHAT IS VIRTUAL REALITY? 1. Introduction to Virtual Reality 2. VR: The Medium

PART II VIRTUAL REALITY SYSTEMS 3. The Human in the Loop 4. Input: Interfacing the Participant(s) with the Virtual World 5. Output: Interfacing the Virtual World with the Participant(s) 6. Presenting the Virtual World 7. Interacting with the Virtual World

PART III APPLIED VIRTUAL REALITY 8. Bringing the Virtual World to Life 9. Experience Conception and Design: Applying VR to a Problem 10. Virtual Reality: Past, Present, Future

Sherman, William R.
William R. Sherman is a member of the Indiana University Advanced Visualization Lab, where he leads efforts in Scientific Visualization and Virtual Reality. He also teaches undergraduate and graduate courses on VR and Visualization, which he has done for two decades, including at the University of Nevada, Reno (UVR), and at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC).

Previously he founded the Center for Advanced Visualization, Computation and Modeling (CAVCaM) at the Desert Research Institute (DRI), where he led the VR and Visualization efforts, including overseeing the installation of a FLEX CAVE-style VR system as well as a 6-sided CAVE system. Prior to DRI, he led the virtual reality effort at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) at UIUC, working with the Electronic Visualization Lab to install and operate the second CAVE VR system.

He has authored several book chapters and papers on the topics of scientific visualization and virtual reality, and has organized and led "bootcamps" on immersive visualization in collaboration with the Idaho National Lab and Kitware Inc. Sherman is the architect of the FreeVR VR integration library. He has attended every single IEEE Virtual Reality conference since 1995, and was chair of the 2008 conference. Craig, Alan B.
Dr. Alan B. Craig is an independent consultant in Virtual Reality, Augmented Reality, Visualization, and High Performance Computing. Prior to this role, he contributed much to these fields during his thirty-year career at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC) as a Research Scientist at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) and as Senior Associate Director for Human-Computer Interaction at the Institute for Computing in Humanities, Arts, and Social Science (I-CHASS). Among his other consulting roles, he is currently engaged with the Extreme Science and Engineering Discovery Environment (XSEDE).

Dr. Craig has been