Welcome to Jerry Isdale's VR Page

VR, or Virtual Reality, is a term with many meanings. My basic definition is:
A computer mediated, 3D environment with viewer control over viewpoint (position, orientation, zoom)
Presentation is primarily visual, possibly augmented with audio, haptics, etc.  Some degree of interaction with the environment is desirable. I don't require goggles, gloves, full sensory immersion, etc.
"What Is VR?"  : This is the most recent version of my well respected introduction to virtual reality. Earlier versions are scattered around the net in various repositories.  This is the home place for the document. I'm slowly updating it and plan a major rewrite after I get a few more VR News columns completed.

I have given several tutorials at ACM and IEEE conferences.  The latest was at IEEE VR 2003. Turns out to be the 10th anniversary of my first release of WhatIsVR... so here is the PDF of the slides from that course...

Generic list of VR Link: I update these from my surfing irregularly.
VR News Tech Review  I wrote the Technology Review Column for VR News magazine.

Each month I profile a selected technology area in about 1000 words (yeah its a tight fit).  The link above is to my local listing of upcoming columns and links from completed ones.  The gig ended in 2000 and VRNews is now purely a web based news source.  Some of the old material is there, but not all, and without active links. Perhaps someday I'll archive them locally. Check here for more info and some of the raw word documents.
You will also find a copy of my VT Tech Tutorial given at ACM Multimedia 2000.

IEEE InfoVis98 is a trip report on the Oct. 1998 conference on this subject.
InfoVis Links is my  large collection of links on the subject.

A trip report on VR at Siggraph 2002 is also available. It includes some info on Commodity Clusters for VR - my R&D area for 2002.

Write me at isdale@acm.org. My home page is http://www.isdale.com/jerry