What is a virtual environment? What potential does it hold for education?

Virtual reality is a combination of hardware and soft ware that together create a digital environment with which learners can interact. As PC system capacity increases, more and more complex programs can be created, such as virtual reality. Using VR hardware you can see and interact with a 3D digital world. VR environment let learners take realistic virtual field trips using digital images of real places. Others are constructed from micro world at a molecular or atomic level or from images gathered from NASA space probs. These kinds of places already exit today. Such as users using a specific gloves that adjust the VR world to interactive with it.
Some places in the real world, students can not go to see or too small to be seen, but the VR environment can help. The computer can offer a digital environment which allows students to “see” in their own way, such as move the planets or go inside of a certain atom to research the layout. Anyway just like the real world. Another thing is some places are too dangerous to students to go and the lab can not create this environment either, but VR can. Let us say volcano. Some students may need to study on it and it is too dangerous for them to go there to see it, besides volcano does not exit everywhere. Then VR helps and it can mimic a real volcano environment and allow students to get familiar with it. These are just a little example of the function of VR. In fact the VR can do more than these, some VR software may include school or classroom tours, virtual field trips, creating a virtual museum, or playing specimens or exhibits that other students can manipulate.
The VR software holds a lot potential for education with the development of technology, especially with development of PC. It can broaden the angle of teaching and learning. In the past, students just can get the knowledge from the live instructors and can not see, so everything is based upon their imagination. Nowadays with the help of computer programs the students can not only see the models but also can listen if necessary. These are really helpful with improving the efficiency of learning and teaching. The instructors may need to spend a whole day to explain a certain chemical changing process to the students, but now just need ten minutes to show them a piece of video that offered by VR program.
So the VR will do more and more for education in the future. The only limitation of using VR, as the author said, is the limitation of human’s imagination.