A Hitchhiker's Guide to Virtual Reality

This book is a two-part guide to the science, technology, mathematics, and practical implementation of virtual reality. Part 1 contains an explanation of what virtual reality (VR) is (and what it is not!) and what lies inside the hardware components of a VR system. It also details the theory of many technically challenging aspects of VR in a very coherent manner. These include stereoscopy, computer vision, imagebased rendering, and inverse kinematics, all of which are central to creating an immersive and interactive VR system. Part 2 of the book concentrates on the actual implementation of a practical VR system. The accompanying CD is a complement to Part 2, providing over 30 projects and associated software that can be used to implement many aspects of a VR system.

Karen McMenemy is a lecturer at Queen's University Belfast, in the Intelligent Systems and Control Group of the School of Electronics, Electrical Engineering and Computer Science. She has almost ten years experience working in the fields of computer vision, graphics, and image processing. She introduced the teaching of virtual reality at Queen's University, and she designed new courses for both the undergraduate and postgraduate degree programs.Stuart Ferguson has over 25 years experience in computer graphics and software engineering. He was the principal developer of the commercial 3D computer animation packages Envisage and SoftFX. He designed and implemented the code for the open-source 3D animation and modeling package OpenFX. He is the author of the book Practical Algorithms for 3D Computer Graphics (2001) and currently a lecturer and researcher at Queen's University of Belfast.