Approaches and Applications of Virtual Reality and Gesture Recognition: A Review

Concepts In Virtual Reality

Since the inception of virtual reality and its conception by Ivan Sutherland, different perceptions of virtual reality have been developed and presented. While each of them differs from one another in their method of implementation, the level of immersion and sensory revelation, they all share some qualities that are unique to the concept of virtual reality. A well-known method proposed by Zelzter (Zeltzer, 1992) is the Zelzter’s AIP cube which defines the components in a virtual reality environment’s complexity and quality using three parameters namely – Autonomy, Interaction and Presence as shown in Figure 1. These parameters are expressed as the coordinate axes of a cube. Autonomy is defined as a qualitative measure of the ability of a computational model to act and react to simulated events and stimuli, ranging from 0 for the passive geometric model to 1 for the most sophisticated, physically based virtual agent. Interaction is the degree of access to model parameters at runtime (i.e., the ability to define and modify states of a model with immediate response). The range is from 0 for “batch” processing in which no interaction at runtime is possible, to 1 for comprehensive, real-time access to all model parameters. Presence provides a rough (dimensionless) measure of the number and fidelity of available input and output channels” (Kalawsky, 2000).