252 Copyright © 2010, IGI Global. Copying or distributing in print or electronic forms without written permission of IGI Global is prohibited. Chapter 12 Virtual Reality: A New Era of Simulation and Modelling Ghada Al-Hudhud Al-Ahlyia Amman University, Amman, Jordan VIRTUAL REALITY: OVERVIEW Virtual reality is commonly known as a 3D projec- tion of a seemed to be real image of the mind. This world of 3D projections is believed to alter what human senses perceive. Virtual Reality (VR) has been known only in the past few years, but VR has a history dating back to the year 1950s. VR roots started as an idea that would improve the way people interacted with computers. Douglas Engelbart 1960s introduced the use of computers as tools for digital display. Inspired by Engelbart past experience as a radar ABSTRACT The chapter introduces a modern and advanced view and implementations of Virtual reality systems. Considering the VR systems as tools that can be used in order to alter the perceived information from real world and allow perceiving the information from virtual world. Virtual Reality grounds the main concepts for interactive 3D simulations. The chapter emphasizes the use of the 3D interactive simu- lations through virtual reality systems in order to enable designers to operationalize the theoretical concepts for empirical studies. This emphasize takes the form of presenting most recent case studies for employing the VR systems. The frst emphasizes the role of realistic 3D simulation in a virtual world for the purpose of pipelining complex systems production for engineering application. This requires highly realistic simulations, which involves both realism of object appearance and object behaviour in the vir- tual world. The second case emphasizes the evolution from realism of virtual reality towards additional reality. Coupling interactions between virtual and real worlds is an example of using the VR system to allow human operators to interactively communicate with real robot through a VR system. The robots and the human operators are potentially at different physical places. This allows for 3D-stereoscopic robot vision to be transmitted to any or all of the users and operators at the different sites. DOI: 10.4018/978-1-60566-774-4.ch012