Virtual Reality Gets Real 虚拟现实：奇妙新世界.docVIP

Virtual Reality Gets Real 虚拟现实：奇妙新世界虚拟现实（virtual reality，简称VR）对很多人来说还是个虚无缥缈的概念。但在2016年1月的国际消费类电子产品展览会上，一系列炫酷的VR产品吸引了人们的眼球。尽管VR技术的发展仍不够成熟，但它已开始在教育、娱乐、考古、医疗等领域应用。说不准哪一天，虚拟现实就会走进你我的生活，创造出一个超乎想象的奇妙新世界。In 1965， Ivan Sutherland， a computer-graphics pioneer， addressed an international meeting of techies on the subject of virtual reality. The ultimate virtual-reality display， he told the audience， would be “a room within which the computer can control the existence of matter. A chair displayed in such a room would be good enough to sit in. Handcuffs displayed in such a room would be confining， and a bullet displayed in such a room would be fatal. With appropriate programming， such a display could literally be the Wonderland into which Alice walked.”Virtual reality has advanced rapidly in the past couple of years―the much-anticipated Oculus Rift headset1） is expected to arrive in stores in 2016. Yet the technology is still very new， and Sutherland’s vision seems little closer to actual reality. “Right now， it’s like when you first had cellphones，” Richard Marks， one of the lead engineers working on Project Morpheus2） told me. “A lot of focus is still on the most-basic things.” I recently spoke with scientists， psychologists， engineers， and developers about the possibilities for this emerging field. Where might it eventually take us―and will that be somewhere we want to go？Being Virtually AnywhereDuring a recent demonstration of Google Cardboard3） I found myself by turns atop a rocky peak， in a barn next to a snorting horse， and on a gondola4） making my way up a mountain. The gondola ride gave me vertigo5）. We react like that， experts say， because our brains are easily fooled when what we see on a display tracks our head movements. “We have a reptilian instinct6） that responds as if it’s real： Don’t step off that cliff，” Jeremy Bailenson， the founding director of Stanford’s Virtual Human Interaction Lab， told me. “The brain hasn’t evolved to tell you it’s not real.”Much of th