State of the Art of Virtual Reality Technology

In the past three years, the so-called second wave of Virtual Reality (VR) has brought us a vast amount of new displays and input devices. Not only new hardware has entered the consumer market providing affordable pricing models but also completely new technologies are being designed and developed. Additionally new concepts for handling existing problems on the hardware and software side of the VR technology are constantly being introduced. This software and hardware development is mainly lead by enthusiasts interested in the domain of VR opposed to the established scientific community, which already partially makes use of the newly available technology. Besides Head-Mounted Displays (HMDs), either cable-based or mobile, other devices like haptics devices, controllers, vests, omnidirectional treadmills, tracking technologies, as well as optical scanners for gesture-based interaction are gaining importance in the field of commodity VR. Most of these technologies are already precise and robust enough to be used for professional operation and scientific experiments. The topics discussed are the common issues with the new technologies including the approaches to solve them as for example motion-to-photon latency, barrel distortion, and low-persistence displays. Additionally an in-depth analysis of the available solutions expected to hit the market is provided. A taxonomy categorising the current developments with the chosen implementation approaches will be given. The paper analyses the state of technological advancements in the field and provides an extensive overview on the current development considering the upcoming devices and the advancements from the software side.