A recent cover story in Desktop Engineering magazine brings real-world virtual reality back into the limelight.

It’s difficult to believe that VR‘s been around for nearly two decades, pioneered by dreadlocked disciple, visionary, and computer scientist Jaron Lanier. As fast as technology moves, it’s stunning that VR has largely remained a back-burner fantasy. Enthusiastic engineering and corporate types have, on occasion over the years, shown me their always impressive VR efforts. Certainly applicable to very high-end design and manufacturing, VR has encountered a variety of roadblocks—for example, day-to-day usability, computing horsepower and, of course, prohibitive hardware and software costs. (Note an exceptional background article, What’s Real in Virtual Reality, by Frederick P. Brooks, Jr., University of North Carolina.)

Encouragingly, VR programs are alive and well at some colleges and universities, including the University of Michigan and Iowa State University. A February, 2005, Desktop Engineering cover story, See It, Feel It, Hear It has brought VR back into the mainstream engineering limelight. Updating and enhancing the visual immersion concept, new forms of VR add “…sound and touch feedback to virtual prototypes,” bringing “a sense of realism that blends the virtual with the actual.” The article also comments, “The single biggest area of recent improvement has been in graphics cards. ‘We’ve all benefited a great deal from the video game developers; so much so, that we’re starting to see PC clusters come into the virtual reality environment, replacing Unix platforms.’” Powerful stuff, indeed, not only in terms of technology and VR, but of moving entire markets.