Building a Bridge Between Reality and Virtuality

The first time I truly realized the power of the word “simulation” was after watching the movie “Ready Player One”.

It is not a science fiction film in the serious sense. Just as “Outer Wilds” is to astronomers, it is more like a love letter written to simulation idealists—a virtual world that is precisely modeled, self-consistent in its rules, and stable in operation, where humans work, compete, socialize, and even fulfill dreams that cannot be realized in reality. The moment the characters on screen put on their headsets and stepped into the “OASIS”, I felt an indescribable resonance. This was not because of an escape from reality, but because reality finally had the possibility of being re-expressed.

At that time, I could not yet accurately describe this feeling; I was only vaguely aware that if humans could truly construct a world that is highly consistent with reality yet free from physical constraints, then technology would no longer be just a tool, but a new way of cognition—a novel path for us to move toward the future.

Putting on the Headset for the First Time

Later, I actually came into contact with a virtual reality headset. It was a completely novel experience. Resolution, latency, refresh rate, tracking accuracy—every parameter was calm and rational. But the moment the image stabilized and a sense of space was established, I seemed to overlap with the protagonist of “Ready Player One”.

I was not “seeing” a virtual space; I was re-understanding space itself with my body.

From then on, “simulation” was no longer just a term in scientific research in my mind, but an engineering practice taking place in reality. It connects physics, mathematics, computer graphics, and control theory, as well as people’s intuitive perception of the world.

The Order of the Real World

What truly led me into the world of simulation was the robotic arm.

The robotic arm is an extremely rational and realistic system. Its joint angles, torque, velocity, and acceleration—each quantity corresponds to real physical constraints. It will not run more stably because of your ideals, nor will it automatically avoid singular configurations because of your enthusiasm.

But precisely because of this, it becomes an ideal subject for simulation. When I first attempted to “project” the robotic arm into a virtual space, I realized that this was not simply a matter of three-dimensional modeling, but an engineering challenge concerning consistency: Are the coordinate systems unified? Is the kinematic model accurate? Can sensor data be mapped in real time? Is the virtual feedback sufficient to guide real-world actions?

Among these, there are countless technical details. These details form points, which form lines, and then form surfaces, making simulation no longer about “drawing something that looks like the real thing,” but about making the virtual system truly equivalent to the real system in both mathematical and physical terms.

When the Model Begins to “Come to Life”

My turning point came at the moment when the virtual and real were combined. Upon graduating from undergraduate studies, in order to verify the engineering and interdisciplinary skills I had acquired over four years, I chose to work on a virtual reality teleoperation system for a robotic arm. For me, this was almost an engineering task I had never completed before; there was very little experience to draw upon, and the systems involved were intricate and complex.

Code is inherently dry and dull; engineering is inherently tedious and complicated. But when the true goal feels genuinely romantic from the bottom of one’s heart, then forging ahead through thorns and brambles becomes only natural.

When the motion trajectory of the real robotic arm was synchronously mapped into the virtual space; when the planning results from the virtual environment, in turn, constrained the actions of the real robotic arm; when debugging, verification, and trial and error no longer consumed the lifespan of real hardware—

For the first time, I clearly felt a sense of achievement that was almost pure: it was not the excitement of “the program running successfully”, nor the brief satisfaction of “the experiment succeeding”, but a deeper confirmation: simulation was becoming a part of the engineering system, rather than an accessory outside of engineering. It seemed that we might truly be able to experience super-real-time simulation firsthand and control temporal changes that humans cannot normally manage.

At this moment, the virtual world was no longer “fake”, and the real world was no longer the only “true”. Through models, data, and constraints, they were precisely bound together, jointly forming a higher-level system.

Romance Beyond Rationality

Some people say that scientific research is calm, restrained, and rational.

I do not deny this. This is especially true for simulation work, which demands rigorous derivation, repeated verification, and a relentless scrutiny of errors. But it is precisely upon this rationality that I have seen a romantic side. It is a romance that belongs to engineers and researchers: the courage to abstract chaotic reality into computable models; the belief that complex systems can be understood, predicted, and improved; the persistence to fail again and again in virtual space, just to save the real world from taking detours.

Simulation does not distance us from reality; on the contrary, it allows us to face the complexity of reality at a lower cost and from a higher perspective.

Building a Bridge

Looking back on this path: from the imagination in the movie, to the space within the headset, and then to the virtual-real mapping of the robotic arm.

I have become increasingly clear that what I am doing is not “chasing the future”, but rather building a bridge for reality—a bridge connecting ideals and engineering, the virtual and the real.

Perhaps it is not yet perfect; perhaps there is still a long way to go before truly large-scale application. But every time a model converges, every time a system runs stably, it makes me more convinced: simulation is not a means of escaping reality, but an important way to understand and transform reality.

This is my story with simulation.