Armin Grasnick - Basics of Virtual Reality: From the Discovery of Perspective to VR Glasses

This book is a translation of the original German edition Grundlagen der virtuellen Realitt by Grasnick, Armin, published by Springer-Verlag GmbH, DE in 2020. The translation was done with the help of artificial intelligence (machine translation by the service DeepL.com). A subsequent human revision was done primarily in terms of content, so that the book will read stylistically differently from a conventional translation. Springer Nature works continuously to further the development of tools for the production of books and on the related technologies to support the authors.

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The example of innovation illustrates one thing quite well. Even though modern products like to be labelled world firsts, revolutions or disruptions, the previous development history remains. In truth, even the most modern technologies have historical antecedents and have rarely appeared completely out of the blue. Sometimes a new technology is merely a contemporary adaptation of an earlier technology that produces better or faster results with the means and processes available today. Every smartphone camera is still based on the idea of the camera obscura, whose basic mode of operation has been state of the art for more than two millennia.

When I started working on this book, I had initially planned to concentrate primarily on the technical description of the imaging representation. However, the more intensively I dealt with the fundamentals of virtual reality during my research, the more important it seemed to me that I should place it in the context of the history of technology.

An image must be seen and for this you need the visual system. Eyes and vision, like man, did not develop suddenly, but are the result of many millions of years of evolution. The technology for generating images as realistically as possible also has an evolutionary history that spans several millennia. It is not a new observation that the constant increase in knowledge is always based on the previous knowledge of earlier generations.

It seems appropriate to introduce these people to you one by one. Since I assume that sometimes you would like to know a little more than the name, I have taken the liberty of adding an index of persons at the end of the book, in which I have given each individual at least a short line. For some of them this was quite easy; for others only little information is known; for some of them only the name has been handed down. However, I have made every effort to obtain basic knowledge about each of them and have studied many additional sources.

In this book, I will first look at the basics of virtual reality very specifically from the point of view of its historical development, before going on to look at how the technology is shaping up. So that you can follow me, I have fully disclosed my sources to you. If something seems particularly interesting to you now and you want to know more about exactly this fact, you may have a first clue from which you can start your further studies.

Virtual reality is generated particularly through vision. Every form of representation is based on a technique that reliably enables a reproduction of the object to be represented. Most information is taken in via the eye, which means that knowledge of our surroundings is not only largely visual in nature, but also always perspectival in essence. It is therefore quite natural that the attempt to reproduce reality also relies mainly on the visual component, and the use of perspective makes the copies seem all the more realistic.