Developing Virtual Reality Applications

Preface

How this Book Came to Be

This book, Developing Virtual Reality Applications: Foundations of Effective Design, has been many years in the making. Our interest in virtual reality came about as an outgrowth of our interest in, and our day-to-day work in scientific visualization. In the early 1990s the state-of-the-art in computer graphics used for scientific visualization was to take scientific data, clean it up, create geometry from it, place computer graphics lights, choose a camera perspective, and then render, not in real time, single images of computer graphics output. To create animations, one then created a sequence of images where either the camera perspective, or the underlying data evolves over time. The resulting images could be ...