A Hitchhiker’s Guide to Virtual Reality

A Hitchhiker''s Guide to Virtual Reality brings together under one cover all the aspects of graphics, video, audio, and haptics that have to work together to make virtual reality a reality. Like any good guide, it reveals the practical things you need to know, from the viewpoint of authors who have been there. This two-part guide covers the science, technology, and mathematics of virtual reality and then details its practical implementation. The first part looks at how the interface between human senses and technology works to create virtual reality, with a focus on vision, the most important sense in virtual reality. The second part of the book is tightly integrated with an accompanying CD, which contains the programs for more than 30 virtual reality projects, ranging in scope from a tool that simulates virtual sculpting to a suite of software for the control of a four-projector immersive virtual environment.

Karen McMenemy is a lecturer at Queen’s University Belfast, in the Intelligent Systems and Control Group of the School of Electronics, Electrical Engineering and Computer Science. She has almost ten years experience working in the fields of computer vision, graphics, and image processing. She introduced the teaching of virtual reality at Queen’s University, and she designed new courses for both the undergraduate and postgraduate degree programs. Stuart Ferguson has over 25 years experience in computer graphics and software engineering. He was the principal developer of the commercial 3D computer animation packages Envisage and SoftFX. He designed and implemented the code for the open-source 3D animation and modeling package OpenFX. He is the author of the book Practical Algorithms for 3D Computer Graphics (2001) and currently a lecturer and researcher at Queen’s University of Belfast.