Levels of realism: from virtual reality to real virtuality

  • Authors:
  • Alan Chalmers;Andrej Ferko

  • Affiliations:
  • University of Warwick, UK;Comenius University, Slovakia

  • Venue:
  • Proceedings of the 24th Spring Conference on Computer Graphics
  • Year:
  • 2008

Quantified Score

Hi-index 0.00

Visualization

Abstract

Realism in real-time has long been a "holy grail" of the computer graphics community. While real-time performance is typically accepted as 25fps and above, the definition of realism remains less clear. If we were able to simulate the physics of the real world to minute detail then it would be possible for us to achieve images which were physically correct. However, the amount of computation required for such physical accuracy of complex scenes precludes any possibility of achieving such images in reasonable, let alone real-time, on a desktop computer for many years to come. Furthermore, there is no guarantee of realism as these images do not take into account how the human may perceive this information. Our perception of an environment is not only what we see, but may be significantly influenced by other sensory input, including sound, smell, touch, and even taste. If virtual environments are ever to be regularly used as a valuable tool to experiment in the virtual world with confidence that the results are the same as would be experienced in the real world, then we need to be able to compute these environments to be perceptually equivalent as if we were "there" in the real world; so called "there-reality" or real virtuality. This paper surveys promising efforts to date and identifies and discusses future research directions.