engleski

Virtual Reality Application for Networked dictionary

Virtual reality (VR) is mainly used for experimental, but also, to an ever increasing extent, for commercial purposes including education, industrial design, surgical training, art, architecture, entertainment, promotion, etc. This paper considers usage of VR for distance learning, specifically for dictionary application. From the aspect of both human-to-human communication and human understanding virtual reality seems to be more attractive than standard widespread multimedia services [1]. This has motivated our efforts to extend our multimedia dictionary network application [2] to virtual reality elements. Dictionary is a typical multimedia application but, so far it has not been a typical virtual reality application. In this paper we show how to include virtual reality elements in dictionary application. There are at least three reasons why VR has not yet become educational standard. The first reason is connected with technical problems including many ergonomic problems, i.e. how to produce VR system and how to make them convenient for users. The second problem is cost. Due to their high price, VR systems will not be accepted by majority of people. However, the cost of VR equipment is falling rapidly. Competition in that field makes it almost impossible to trace the most powerful manufactures and the most cost effective products. Unfortunately, the major market activity is going on in the field of entertainment equipment, specifically the one connected with 3D images/videos. Considering many other VR elements (sensing human body, grip intensity, smells etc.) virtual reality is presently only at the beginning and it is currently predominantly used in the laboratory. The third problem is lack of standards in software as well as in hardware. Soon, when the technical problems are solved and when the prices of the VR equipments decrease, this will become the major obstacle in the spreading process of the VR systems. Although today there are more and more VR applications, VR is still finding new applications [10]. This paper deals with an example of VR education application (i.e. dictionary). The application purpose of virtual reality dictionary network is at least threefold: &middot ; to assist users not proficient enough in the English language, &middot ; to provide the professionals with correct translations of technical terms, &middot ; to support (supplement) distance-learning applications [3]. Although current technology provides a ubiquitous access to a vast amount of information on a huge variety of topics, one has to be aware of the following two facts. First, the information content is mainly presented in English, while for a significant portion of Internet users English is not a native language. Second, technical vocabulary is continuously being enlarged with new terms and acronyms that emerge with the advent of new technologies. The two mentioned arguments have been a driving force behind the idea of developing the application of a virtual reality dictionary network. In communication and information technologies, as it is case with other fast growing technologies, a lot of new concepts, technical terms and words appear practically every day. So using of networked dictionary that enables fast, easy and simply vocabulary updating is almost necessity. Besides that, network application enables interaction with users so they can very easy suggest new words or propose new translations for existing words. We deal specifically with an English/Croatian and Croatian/English dictionary containing only technical terminology, but the concepts described here are general and can be applied to any virtual reality application sharing same similarity with our design goals. The paper is organized as follows. An architecture overview of the proposed system is described in Section 2. Section 3 and Section 4 give short analyses of virtual reality sensors and actuators, respectively. Section 5 gives some implementation issues. We conclude in Section 6.

vitual reality, dictionary, telecommunications systems

nije evidentirano