BKVRPABI.RVW 950710 "Virtual Reality: Practical Applications in Business and Industry", Dimitris Chorafas/Heinrich Steinmann, 1995, 0-13-185638-3 %A Dimitris Chorafas %A Heinrich Steinmann %C One Lake St., Upper Saddle River, NJ 07458 %D 1995 %G 0-13-185638-3 %I Prentice Hall PTR %O +1-201-236-7139 fax: +1-201-236-7131 beth_hespe@prenhall.com %P 320 %T "Virtual Reality: Practical Applications in Business and Industry" If you are looking for information on virtual reality, you will probably be mildly disappointed by this book. The coverage is fairly broad, touching on issues of simulation, training, interface design, telepresence, visualization, input devices, multimedia, and so forth. The material has almost no depth, however, and has nothing to say beyond any number of current works. Aside from brief descriptions of some past and present projects, there is no discussion of implementation or other details. If you are looking for practical applications in business and industry, you will probably be quite disappointed. The authors' definition of "virtual reality" seems to be quite broad when it comes to business uses, and includes such arcane technology as the facsimile machine. They tend to concentrate on the "virtual corporation", seemingly a sequence of entrepreneurial deals--or the "virtual office"--otherwise known as telecommuting. Most of the other applications seem to be limited to simulations and visualization on the level of business presentation graphics. If you are looking for an integrated overview of VR use in business, you will probably be profoundly disappointed. The material on the two different topics is joined only by physical proximity. In fact, the change of subject within a given chapter tends to be both abrupt and distracting. Technical material which seems to have little to do with either virtual reality or business gets thrown in from time to time. There are numerous 3-D graphs which don't graph anything, and a couple of fractal plots of the Mandelbrot set, whose relation to any of the above is a mystery. Even the strictly business content is of questionable use. It promotes many ideas which are currently popular, but without any suggestions of "how to." At one point, a footnote admits that the following section is based on "consensus opinion," rather than any studies or practical models. Not a very businesslike foundation. copyright Robert M. Slade, 1995 BKVRPABI.RVW 950710 ====================== roberts@decus.ca rslade@cln.etc.bc.ca Rob.Slade@f733.n153.z1.fidonet.org Just about every computer on the market today runs UNIX, except the Mac (and nobody cares about it). - Bill Joy, 6/21/85 Author "Robert Slade's Guide to Computer Viruses" 0-387-94311-0/3-540-94311-0