For many engineers, designers, scientists and medics VR has already become a mainstream technology. Much of it is a far cry from the popular hype and vision of head mounted displays and gloves seen in the games environment. It is far more pragmatic! Screen based VR now dominates by virtue of the fact that it is readily available, easy to use and realises great benefit. Today engineering design is probably the dominant application area with medicine a very close second.

Designing all but the simplest artefacts on paper has had its day. Moving to the N-Dimensional world of VR adds greater clarity and understanding, but more importantly great savings are to be had. The need to drastically shorten time to market, and get products right first time, have brought this technology to the fore. Producing anything from a mobile phone through to an automobile or an airline terminal can see savings of over 30% in time and money through the use of VR.

Similar savings can also be realised in process design where logistics and components are critical factors in production flow and control. Visualising the final design in full (virtual) operation is a vital step in getting it right, but without the expense of an actual build. All the best organisations are deep into this area as a matter of course. It is no longer a laboratory toy, it is an essential tool!

Medical applications are developing rapidly with everything from body fly-throughs to operation simulations and animations. But in this area, along with many others, it is the mixing of the real and virtual worlds where the greatest advantage probably lies. Combining Telepresence and VR allows surgeons the benefit of a real world view augmented by computer generated simulations. In recent trials surgeons have been able to stand 'one inside the other' at a distance to experience new surgical techniques for the first time, or receive reassurance during a first time solo operation. This technology is equally applicable to the repair of a PC, jet engine or heating plant. It offers a new and alternative approach to education - a metaphoric guide on the inside!

Managing a modern company can be like flying a 747 airliner with 100 fold the instrumentation than is actually necessary. It is not uncommon to be data rich and information poor. You can see the temperature of the toilet seats, but your altitude and heading is any body's guess! Here VR has a very big, and largely unrecognised, part to play. It is ideally suited to the representation of highly complex and data rich situations. Beneath this very thin veneer of civilisation we are natural hunters. One of our primary skills is visual correlation. We did not evolve the skills for gazing at spread sheets. But put data into an N- Dimensional VR field and the results are stunning. Experiments have seen board members digest 2Gbyte of information in a matter of 20 seconds - and understand a complex situation for the first time. This is more than the entire contents of the encyclopaedia Britannic! The trick, animated graphics, not spread sheets and static 2D graphs, but moving, interactive 3D colour.

VR also offers significant potential for the teaching of science, mathematics and many other topics. It is principally a medium for direct experience and soon we will have the ability to step inside the atom or the molecule, fly a proton and experience fission, rather than just gaze at a set of complex equations. For the first time we will see and feel the binding energies in the alignment process of a long chain molecule whilst simultaneously viewing the equations and associated graphical information. For many well understood systems and situations we can already view and handle mathematical functions and models in a new way. They no longer have to be artificially frozen in time and space by the limitation of the paper page, but can be alive with N-Dimensional interactivity.

It is interesting to reflect that only 50 years ago classes at schools and universities were commonly augmented by practical demonstrations on a laboratory bench that may still be in the front row today. Effectively that was Virtual Reality 50 years ago - you just sat and watched someone else do it. Today much more can be done on the screen by everyone. It may be the tool we have been looking for - instant education and understanding - just in time! Question is - will anyone be in the real classroom - or will it all go virtual?