III. Read the following article and give its summary in Russian and then in English (see Appendix).

Vr Applications

The first fully-fledged application of head-mounted displays was in "Darth Vader" helmets developed in the early 1980s by the US Air Force. Funding for the project came from the enormous "Star Wars" during the Reagan presidency. Thomas Furness started building a prototype at the Wright-Patterson airbase in Ohio, in 1982. He saw that fighter planes were becoming so complex and powerful that they threatened to exceed the capabilities of human beings to use them effectively. A fighter pilot's tasks had become so complex and demanding new ways of controlling the flight and weapons. The new systems they created would allow pilots to access flight data in less abstracted, more intuitive forms. Informed by an analysis of the way humans use visual and auditory cues to determine spatial orientation, new systems were designed to make the controls fit humans better. The computers combined radar, control and weapons data into a simple graphical form, representing the aircraft's position, speed, underlying landscape and target in a symbolic form on the head-up display. This was combined with auditory cues, also designed to simulate 3D space.

As the technologies of virtual reality evolve, the applications of VR become literally unlimited. It is assumed that VR will reshape the interface between people and information technology by offering new ways for the communication of information, the visualization of processes, and the creative expression of ideas. Note that a virtual environment can represent any three-dimensional world that is either real or abstract. This includes real systems like buildings, landscapes, underwater shipwrecks, spacecrafts, archaeological excavation sites, human anatomy, sculptures, crime scene reconstructions, solar systems, and so on. Of special interest is the visual and sensual representation of abstract systems like magnetic fields, turbulent flow structures, molecular models, mathematical systems, auditorium acoustics, stock market behavior, population densities, information flows, and any other conceivable system. These virtual worlds can be animated, interactive, shared, and can expose behavior and functionality. Useful applications of VR include training in a variety of areas (military, medical, equipment operation, etc.), education, design evaluation (virtual prototyping), architectural walk-through, human factors and ergonomic studies, simulation of assembly sequences and maintenance tasks, assistance for the handicapped, study and treatment of phobias (e.g., fear of height), entertainment, and much more.

IV. Fill in the chart with the some more appropriate info: Who uses Virtual Reality?

User	Use	Implementation	Benefit
NASA	recreating different critical situations (e.g. situation ‘fire or not to fire’)	flight simulations; battle simulation	risk-free, inexpensive, military training
Architects
Medicine		turning a CAT scan into 3D model of the patient’s body; telepresence workstations for surgical procedures	microcameras attached to endoscopic devices relayed images that could be shared among a group of surgeons looking at one or more monitors, often in diverse locations
Education		the Room of Educational Wall
Libraries		telepresence
Museums		creating a 3-D image of an exhibit