This workshop is an NSF-initiated planning workshop to determine research problems in the area of virtual reality that deserve future funding. "Virtual Reality" is thought by many to be a poor and inaccurate description of an enormously popular field. It's various descriptions include a set of capabilities to deliver a tightly coupled, highly interactive, principally 3D visual experience in which the user has the feeling of being immersed in a 3D computer-generated environment. Other descriptions describe a mixture of simulated objects with customary objects, such as images, from real environments. Even other descriptions include warping of the perceived visual space and time or emphasize direct manipulation of objects in the virtual reality or the coordinated experience of two or more persons in a shared simulation scenario. The main goals of the workshop are to identify the most important areas of basic research in virtual reality, to determine the relationship of NSF-funded basic research to other programs, and to produce a set of recommendations on the infrastructure required for sustained basic research. The invitational workshop participants represent a balance of researchers in the area of virtual reality including researchers with NSF grants and researchers in government and industrial laboratories. The workshop focused on four research areas: perception, human-machine interaction, hardware, and applications
