Top Highlights

• What Hermann, Escher, and many others understood is that the brain can be tricked into believing things—or seeing things—that aren’t there or don’t necessarily make logical sense.
• At the same time, VR is appearing in games, research labs, and industrial settings that use headsets, audio inputs, haptic gloves, and other sensory tools to generate ultrarealistic sensations.
• They will also dramatically alter interactions between people through the use of telepresence and telexistence. The former term refers to systems that allow people to feel “present” when they are physical separated. The latter word revolves around the concept that a person can be in a place separate from his or her physical presence.
• “an artificial environment which is experienced through sensory stimuli (such as sights and sounds) provided by a computer and in which one’s actions partially determine what happens in the environment.”
• XR technologies come in many shapes and forms. Virtual reality can incorporate nonimmersive spaces such as surrounding LCD panels where only some of a user’s senses are stimulated; semi-immersive spaces, like a flight simulator, that combine physical and virtual elements in a room; and fully immersive simulations that block out the physical world.