Virtual Reality Books

This guy talks like a PhD. He puts words and sentences together very well that mean little or nothing. He makes up ideas and concepts that sound impressive on the surface but have very little or no substance, based on very simple concepts in reality. Gets the word count up good. If he's not a PhD he should be. This guy is dumb. Except he makes a lot more money than me.

Don't be fooled by Rashid and Couture's slick graphics. Their oeuvre has more to do with the capabilities of computer graphics programs than it does with quality architectural spaces. And the writing is predicatable archi-speak blather carefully crafted to sound more important and serious than it is. Asymptote are one of the many anti-architecture, anti-humanist firms walking the hackneyed architectural walk these days. From the prentious table of contents to the predicatable collage graphics, this book is as commonplace as Starbucks, and offers about as much to urban design today. Give it a miss.

This book is so dated that I am not sure that you could get the examples to compile. Additionally the book was not easy to use or read even during it's time. I had hoped for a book explaining how to create Virtual Worlds, but instead I got a treatise on using one particular program to create boxes on an empty plane.

The content of The Virtual is quite interesting, Shields does a nice job historicizing the terms and contributing to the debates on the implications of a shifting relationship between the virtually real and the material. HOWEVER, a huge problem if you're interested in this book for research: the last 30 pages were not bound in the new copy of this book that I ordered through Amazon. No notes to chapters 3 through 9, no bibliography, and no index. In that respect, it's just not useful.

This book was written in 1996, and it shows. All the hardware it teaches to use is terribly outdated and may not even exist anymore (the CyberMaxx HMD it teaches you to program is an example). If you believe this book will make you able to build a VR deck to experience in virtual reality every computer game you have... forget it.
The projects in this book are very much like Physics demonstrations at school: cute bute useless ways to teach any concept, and sometimes non-standard terms are intentionally used to generate confusion. For example: a portable TV strapped to your eyes and viewed through a lens is called a "biocular display" and made to look like a homemade version of a real VR helmet; a flimsy thing made of wood that holds a Fresnel lens in front of your screen is called a projector; the "flying joystick" is just a standard 1996 disemboweled joystick, held together with duct tape.

If you want to illude some Lawnmower Man fans, convince them to buy this book.

This book is completely inadequate. It just barely skirts the shores of the fundamentals of VRML and then abandons you. Other books by such acknowledged gurus as Marc Pesce go far deeper into the Zen of VRML and Tao of programming for VRML with Java and other technologies. Compared to most competitive volumes, Jamsa's tome is decidedly light on useful content.

In my own self-defense I must preface my review with the fact that I did not buy this book, it was a gift by someone who thought it was a funny name.

I've never posted a review on amazon.com before but if I can stop one parent from buying this book it's worth it, so here it goes...

When you saw the title of the book did you feel like your IQ went down a couple of points? Try reading it some time, it is the story of a kid who chats all the time and writes computer games about viruses who is [...]into his computer so that the web master who runs the whole Internet can send him to catch a virus attacking the Internet's CPU. Lots of plays on words and concepts that will stunt your child's mental growth for years to come. Fear the ignorance the resulted in this book.