• Typewrite keyboards
  inexpensive, reliable, and produce easily transmitted signal
• Light pen, RAND Tablet stylus(1964)
  useful in displaying items and in drawing or printing for input to the computer
• Knobs, Joysticks
  useful in adjusting parameters of computation, adjusting the viewing angle of a perspective view is usually being handled by joysticks.
• Push buttons, syllable voice input

• An intense sense of "realness", as when inner stimuli become more real than objects.
• Transcendence of time and space
• Feelings of undifferentiated unity or merging
• Ineffability or verbal indescribability
• A profound sense of joy or euphoria
• A paradoxical sense of being in and out of the body

• A feeling that they had indeed been somewhere else, in another "place"
• Losing track of time
• Heightened awareness of their own sense of being
• A deep sense of mind/body relaxation
• An inability to speak rationally or to put logical words together afterwards
• A feeling of freedom from their physical bodies and an acute awareness of them at the same time
• Intense emotional feelings, including euphoria and/or an overwhelming sense of loss when the session was ending, causing some to cry and others to exclaim they were no longer afraid of dying

South Park: A wonder land

I am interested in making three dimensional environment where user can navigate in the virtual world. My first encounter with virtual reality pack, which is Head-mounted display, tracker and glove, was amusing and exciting. I took Virtual Environment class with professor Enberg and learned to use a virtual environment commercial application ¡§Eon Reality¡¨, which is an interactive visual content management software provider. The application is currently being used in vehicle industries, furniture, industrial, architecture, computer, engineering, education and defense industries. By being more acquainted with the application, I built a south park wonderland, which is a user interactive virtual environment. User with head-mounted display can navigate the park, change the orientation, and direction by using the tracker and glove. Whenever the participant¡¦s camera view touches the boundary box of the south park characters, the characters will be push away and trigger the characters to respond you with a MIDI sound track file. Every time I immerse inside the park I found myself in a state of euphoria.

However, there are some technical difficulties I found with this virtual reality equipment. First one is that my head felt dizzy after a while using the HMD, and cause some sort of motion sickness after moving fast with the helmet. This prevents me from using the virtual reality equipment for more than 10 minutes each time. Another limitation with the virtual reality equipment is that there is only minimum user interaction we can have with glove and tracker, because our fingers can only bend at certain degrees while most of the times the glove cannot even sense the movement of pinky and ring finger. A joystick will provide a better degree of user interaction with the world. Another thing is that there is no surround sound available in our VR lab, so the sense of realness is lessened. When I navigate inside the park I have fully awareness that I am in a virtual environment because sometimes there is latency occurred in the screen display on the HMD. According to Sutherland, expanding the types of VR input system and technologies, the ultimate goal is to fully operate our body and senses as input devices in the VR system, there, the human-computer interface will soon be realizable. The more artists, scientists, engineers are exposed to the virtual reality systems, the more dynamic impacts and usages virtual reality has. By improving the virtual reality technologies, one day we will be able to be immersed inside the Internet, interacting with it virtually in three dimensions. We may all wear personal headsets that allow us to walk through scenes we now see in two dimensions on our computer monitors. The virtual environment has no limits; instead, the only limitation is our imagination.