Virtual model

A Virtual Model, in the general sense, is a Model of a "thing", be it a person, a room, a house, a city or a planet, in which meaningful details of the "thing" have been extracted and virtualised in order to create a new simpler version that can be used in a computer simulation or Virtual Reality.

The most common examples of Virtual Models are those created in 3D for the purpose of visualisation. The field of architecture has greatly popularised the use of virtual models to animate fly-throughs of yet-to-be-built buildings.

The first mainstream commercial example of a Virtual Model has been created in 1998 by the company My Virtual Model Inc. This company offers tools where the user can create a model of themselves, try on clothing on a wide variety of internet apparel stores including (Sears.com, Landsend.com, LLBean.com) and simulate different outfits on their Virtual Models.

In the future, with computers continuing to increase in speed and capability, Virtual Models are bound to appear in more and more applications and become ubiquitous in our daily lives.