What Is Virtual Reality??!

“Reality is merely an illusion, albeit a persistent one”  ~Albert Einstein

These words are perfect for describing the current state of virtual reality.

All of you would have heard (or seen, for a few people) about the launch of probably the most iconic device of the year (might even be the decade, if it improves well), the Google Glass.
And with it, you might have heard the term ‘Augmented Reality’, and wondered to yourself, ‘what does it actually mean?’
Hopefully this post will clear out all your doubts about it…

The infamous Google Glass!!

Augmented reality, as we can derive from the name, consists of 2 words, ‘augmented’ and ‘reality’. The word augmented simply means enhanced or modified. Thus the term augmented reality implies, ‘modified reality’.The concept of augmented reality revolves around the concept of adding more “information” to your world (more like, your view of the world). Which is done by adding data to the things or places around us, which is not normally visible.

Consider for example, you are taking a stroll around your building, and when you look around, you are able to see all the building names, the number of tenants(that’s a long shot….but still possible :p). And all this tight in front of your eyes! This is achievable through the awesomeness (yes, that’s a word) of virtual realty!

Take another example. How about if you can see everything about your surroundings in an unknown place……..On The Windshield Of Your Car!! Even the thought of something so cool has the innate ability to make tech savvy guys croon over it.

The applications of virtual reality is, quite literally, a bottomless pit (personally, i feel that even that’s an understatement). Virtual reality can be used in medical, military, education, business, social causes(for the disabled), entertainment and many more like them.
In medical: how helpful would it be if the doctor could see a patients internal organs and blood vessels right in front of his eyes before an operation…?

This kind of visualization can be very helpful for doctors to understand internal problems.

The different parts of the body can be visualized separately

In military: wouldn’t it help soldiers, who enter into unknown territories, to see the enemy positions and houses nearby, with the help of satellites, as dots or arrows of different colors right before their eyes!

Soldiers can be trained even before they go into the battle field!

In education: simply put, an interactive interface would aid the learning process.

Engine designs can be imagined and brought to life to aid the learning process

In entertainment: how about a game of virtual Counter Strike?…i doubt i need to say anything more 🙂

Virtual reality can be adapted to almost all the situations that present themselves to us in day to day life …
It would be a boon to an uncountable number of people!!

That basically covers the introduction to virtual reality. Hope it explains it nicely !!!

How Does a Capacitive Touch Work!!

We all use mobiles everyday, almost continuously. And we pretend to have control over how much we use it 🙂  But do we ever stop and think about how the screen of our devices actually work? For most of us out there, i am guessing its still ‘black magic’. So I am hoping that this small post will help everyone understand!!

Parts:

Capacitive touch screen actually consist of 3 different layers or screens.

1. The first layer is the conducting transparent sheet. (The first layer is a glass like panel)
2. The second layer is the capacitive grid, or mesh of conductors, or just a thin conducting sheet.
3. The third is the sensor layer or the capacitance measuring layer.

The three layers and their supports can be seen in the following image.

Working:

In the next image we can see that when we bring our finger (any conductor) close to the 1st layer, the field generated by the 2nd layer is disrupted. This in turn causes a change in capacitance at that point (since capacitance is directly related to the voltage at the point). After that come the use of the 3rd layer which senses the position of the variation in capacitance and sends corresponding data to the processor to process further.

Types:

Even capacitive touch screens are of 2 types, but their main 3 layers still remain the same, even if they work differently. The 2 types are:

1. Surface
2. Projective

The main difference between them is that surface capacitive uses sensors at the corners of the screen to find out where you have clicked and a thin evenly distributed film across the surface (as pictured above) whereas projective capacitive uses a grid of rows and columns with a separate chip for sensing the position.

That’s It!! I hope you guys understood and I also hope I helped you bust this ‘magic’ phenomenon!