Open Questions: Virtual Reality

Galaxy: Virtual Reality: Categorized site directory. Entries usually include descriptive annotations.

KurzweilAI: Web site of Ray Kurzweil, one of the leading contemporary inventors (music synthesis, optical character recognition, speech recognition). Here you will find Kurzweil's vision of the future. Meet his alter ego Ramona. There are also many essays on the future by a variety of other "Big Thinkers".
Introducing Virtual Environments: Excellent multimedia site created by the National Center for Supercomputer Applications (NCSA). Describes history, technology, applications, and frontiers of virtual reality.
National Tele-immersion Web site
Tele-immersion at Brown University
Tele-immersion at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
Tele-immersion at the University of Pennsylvania
Tele-immersion site at Internet2

Deep Vision
Peter Weiss
Science News, June 1, 2002, pp. 344-345: A virtual reality system called CAVE (Cave Automatic Virtual Environment) creates the illusion of a 3-dimensional reality on the walls of a room in which many people can share the same experience without having to wear special equipment.
Virtually There
Jaron Lanier
Scientific American, April 2001, pp. 66-75: Tele-immersion is designed to be an improvement on video conferencing that corrects some of the current shortcomings of that technology.

Michael Heim -- Virtual Realism
Oxford University Press, 1998: Heim is a philosoher who has written on virtual reality for some time. In the first half of this book he gives a tour of the state of the art of virtual reality, and then moves on in the second half to seek some resolution of the dispute over whether "virtual reality" is a promising new use of computer technology or an abuse of it.