Virtuality

This article is about the concept. For other uses, see Virtuality (disambiguation).

The term virtual is a concept applied in many fields with somewhat differing connotations, and also, differing denotations.

The term has been defined in philosophy as "that which is not real" but may display the salient qualities of the real.^{[citation needed]}

Colloquially, virtual is used to mean almost, particularly when used in the adverbial form e.g. "That's virtually [almost] impossible".

By extension to the original philosophical definition, the term virtual has also come to mean "modeling through the use of a computer," where the computer models a physical equivalent. Thus, a virtual world models the real world with 3D structures and virtual reality seeks to model reality, enhancing a virtual world with mechanisms for eye and hand movements. The word 'virtual' now modifies numerous nouns for real world concepts: virtual appliance, virtual museum, virtual learning environment (VLE), virtual studio, and so on.

The use of the word virtual for computer simulation of reality is not merely recent. The Online Etymology Dictionary reports that the sense of "not physically existing but made to appear by software" appears as early as 1959.

See also

• List of things described as virtual