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You may have come across the phrase either in gaming forums of in science fiction, but exactly what is meant by virtual reality, what is it, and does it present us with any possible benefits or advantages in the future?

This phrase can be answered by either simply looking at the technology currently used, and understanding the basics of how it works, and what it tries to achieve. The more complex way of looking at this concept is by firstly asking what we understand by the word reality, before we try understanding the idea of an alternate, virtual version of reality.

Basically, if we understand the idea of reality to be the sum of all of the sensory inputs our brain receives, virtual reality is the use of technology to replace as many of those sensory inputs as possible with computer generated ones, to fool the brain into believing in a world which is false, and which only exists within the brain of the computer.

The most common form of virtual reality is one where the user wears a visor which wraps entirely round their normal field of vision. The computer then projects or displays a visual three dimensional world onto the inside f this visor, entirely replacing what the user would normally see with a computer generated view. The clever part of this is that the visor has a number of motion sensors built in to it, so that if the user turns their head, tilts their head, or moves their body entirely, the display inside the projector will move to match the user's movement, creating the illusion of the user actually moving around within this three dimensional world of the computer's.

Taking this idea further, the world may contain a number of objects, such as furniture, doors, objects that can be picked up and examined. By wearing special gloves which have a whole range of sensors built in to them, the computer can track the position, movement and actions of the user's hands, and work out whether they would be touching anything, and if so, how the objects would react. Would they be being picked up, turned, knocked over and so forth?

By adding audio as well, the user can be very immersed within this world, and with advancing technologies making greater and more realistic computer generated scenes, the user can very easily start to believe in this virtual world, or reality.

One way in which this technology is an exciting area for development is within computer and video games, and already we are starting to see early developments of this with basic visors, and hand controls which are motion sensitive. Eventually we may well all find ourselves entering an alternative reality in which to play our games, which would make chase scenes, fights and cliff top adventures even more breath taking!

Victor Epand is an expert consultant about kids toys, dolls, and video games. You will find the best marketplace for kids toys, dolls, and used video games at these sites for toys, computer games, dolls.

Politico - When incoming President Barack Obama meets with a world leader, attends a diplomatic dinner or reads to a roomful of rapt schoolchildren, he’ll be doing the work of the nation as well as earning his $400,000 annual salary. But when his wife attends the same functions at his side — or in his stead — she’ll be doing it for love. 

Gone are the days where gaming was the reserve of the spotty teenager locked in a darkened bedroom, new research by comScore has proven that the fast growing games users are female. This may not appear too surprising to many who see simulation games, and the Nintendo DS fill their shelves with games such as Nintendogs, Bratz and Simanimals. But what is interesting is that that although the 12-17 age group has seen the fastest growth, it is closely followed by the 55-64 age group, who we presume are not all looking after their Nintendogs.

The numbers of players in the 55-64 years age group grew over three times faster than the remaining age group segments. ComScore suggests that thisdue to partnerships between traditionally female content community sites, such as iVillage, and games sites such as Pogos. However, all of nintendo's marketing for the DS games such as brain training, suduko and others always features a strong proportion of more mature players in their advertising campaigns.

So is this unexpected? I would suggest that no. If we go back in time, to before the web occupied huge amounts of our free personal time, then it was traditionally the mature women who were the biggest buyers of crossword, wordsearch & other puzzle books. All we are seeing here is the continued shift in the "upgrading" to more modern platforms.

"Teach your grannie to text" was a suggestion put forward by a group of Schoolchildren when asked how to improve the world. And infact, what this research shows is that not only is grannie texting, but she'll be fighting you for your x-box on Christmas morning!

This article has is part of a series on the Fantasy Couriers Blog at http://fantasycouriers.wordpress.com

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Reuters - Protesters threw fire bombs at police outside parliament on Wednesday during a general strike which paralyzed Greece and piled pressure on a conservative government reeling from the worst riots in decades.