Chapter 1 WHAT IS VIRTUAL REALITY Your hands grip the steering wheel Cars on your left and right rev their engines The light turns green and you smash your foot into the gas pedal The car leaps ahead You screech around the first corner tires smoking Suddenly you hear a voice in your ear say Hey it's my turn Your time is up Some video games include equipment such as pedals and steering wheels so they seem more like real life
This boy uses a headset and controller to play a virtual reality game You sigh You were just about to take the lead But you pull off the headset and hand the controls to your sister Soon she is experiencing the car the track and the revving engines of a virtual reality racing game You are stuck in your living room
No one else can see what this girl is looking at but the virtual reality headset makes her view look real to her What is a virtual reality game and why does it feel so real Reality is everything in the real world We experience reality using our senses smell touch taste sight and hearing We also use our senses of balance and movement Virtual means close to being something without actually being it A virtual reality system fools our senses It makes us feel that we are experiencing something real when we are not
How Does Virtual Reality Work To fool our senses a virtual reality system needs two parts software and hardware Software is another word for a computer program A program is a set of instructions that tells the computer how to create images and sounds Software created that purple race car you've been driving Want to change the color to yellow The program tells the computer how to do that too A software program tells the computer what to show inside the virtual reality headset
