Virtual Reality: Engineering Applications, Promises and Challenges

Virtual reality (VR) techniques provide natural interactions between the virtual environment and the user. They enable the user to create, modify and manipulate 3D models intuitively, and at the same time allow the user to visualize and analyze data in an immersive virtual environment. By immersing the user in the virtual environment, virtual reality reveals spatially complex structures in a way that makes them easy to understand and study. VR has been applied to many aspects of the modern society and is becoming an increasingly important technology in a number of fields including design, manufacturing, medicine, entertainment, training, etc. This paper provides a review of virtual reality technology and its engineering applications, and also discusses the future promises and challenges of this technology