Close your eyes and imagine yourself being able to jump off the Empire State Building and fly over New York City on your own personal tour. You catch a glimpse of Madison Square Garden and a breathtaking view of Broadway. Jump back a few hundred years into the medieval times and joust with a knight. One last visualization—you are playing baseball in Busch Stadium on the same team as Mark McGuire. The crowd is wild. You soak up the glory as you realize they are cheering for you! Now stop fantasizing. These things will probably never happen to you in real life. However, there is a way that you can experience the feeling that something like this is happening. If you’re open to new ideas and you have a good imagination, virtual reality maybe a toy for you!What exactly is virtual reality? Well, virtual reality can be defined as any medium where one feels a sense of “immersion” and “presence” in the environment generated or described. This means that if your imagination is wild enough, watching any television show or reading a book can be virtual reality. I will define virtual reality as a highly interactive, computer-generated environment. Graphics-based virtual reality allows one to break the 2-Dimensional constraints of today’s familiar equipment and has many practical applications. Four of these applications are medical, space exploration and training, physical, and entertainment.BodyMedical researchers have been using virtual reality techniques to synthesize diagnostic images of a patient’s body to do predictive modeling of radiation treatment using images created by ultrasound, magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), and X-ray. A radiation therapist in a virtual world could view and expose a tumor at any angle and then model specific doses and configuration of radiation beams to aim at the tumor more effectively. Since radiation destroys human tissue easily, there is no allowan...
