Virtual reality offers various types of experiences, including social environments, simulations, and medical applications. The most popular form is a social community, which can be a meeting place or a vast virtual world with defined rules. Medical uses include collaboration and exploration for patients with limited mobility.
There are several types of virtual reality available online, from interactive social environments to medical or physical simulations. When the environment is online, it offers the possibility for multiple users to interact with each other simultaneously within the digital environment, regardless of their physical location. One of the most popular forms of virtual reality online is a social experience, which sometimes takes the form of a structured game or free-form world where users are able to create and manipulate virtual objects. Simulations provide users with the ability to test theories, equations, or other structures that would be difficult or dangerous to execute in the real world. The interface to online virtual reality worlds can be as simple as text commands from a keyboard and monitor to a pair of special stereoscopic goggles and haptic harnesses.
By far, the most popular form of virtual reality online is a virtual social community. This can be simply a digital meeting place where custom avatars represent all the people in a current virtual location, or it can be a vast virtual world where defined rules present challenges for users, as in the case of a massively multiplayer online game (MMOG). The primary aspect that defines this type of virtual reality is the interaction between users in the context of the world.
A social VR environment can be based on a very realistic model of the world, allowing users to explore environments and locations that either closely match their real-world counterparts or are so completely fictional or user-generated that almost anything is possible . Including a rules system, like an MMOG where each avatar has defined stats and goals, can allow players to share the online experience with each other and make the virtual world feel more real. Some environments rely solely on social interaction as the primary motivation for users to keep returning to the virtual world, while also creating an in-game economy that is tied to real money, giving actual monetary value to virtual items.
There are also several medical uses for an online virtual reality setup. One enables collaboration between different hospitals around the world with a common virtual patient or virtual representation of a drug compound that can be manipulated by the participants. Another application is used for children or other patients who cannot leave the confines of the hospital or who have limited mobility, allowing them to explore a virtual world and interact with others who are in similar situations.
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