Real Virtuality: High-fidelity multi-sensory virtual environments

Alan Chalmers is a Professor of Visualisation at the International Digital Laboratory, WMG, University of Warwick, UK. He has an MSc with distinction from Rhodes University, 1985 and a PhD from University of Bristol, 1991. He has published over 180 papers in journals and international conferences on high-fidelity graphics, multi-sensory perception, virtual archaeology and parallel rendering. He is Honorary President of Afrigraph and a former Vice President of ACM SIGGRAPH. His research goal is “Real Virtuality”, obtaining physically-based, multi-sensory, realistic virtual environments at interactive rates through a combination of parallel processing and human perception techniques.


Humans perceive the world with all our five senses: visuals, audio, smell, feel and taste. Crossmodal effects, i.e. the interaction of the senses, can have a major influence on how environments are perceived, even to the extent that large amounts of detail of one sense may be ignored when in the presence of other more dominant sensory inputs. If virtual environments are ever to be used as an authentic representation of reality then they need to achieve the same perceptual level of realism as the real scene they are attempting to represent. Real Virtuality environments (also known as there-reality) are true high-fidelity multi-sensory virtual environments which provide the same perceptual response from viewers as if they were actually present, or “there” in the real scene being portrayed. Unlike traditional virtual reality environments, Real Virtuality allows all five senses to be stimulated concurrently in a natural way. This talk gives an overview of Real Virtuality, describes how such a system may be achieved, and shows why Real Virtuality is a step-change from current virtual reality systems.