AR (Augmented Reality)
It is an interactive experience of a real-world environment where the objects that reside in the real world are enhanced by computer-generated perceptual information, sometimes across multiple sensory modalities, including visual, auditory, hap-tic, extrasensory and olfactory.
Augmented reality is the blending of interactive digital elements – like dazzling visual overlays, buzzy haptic feedback, or other sensory projections – into our real-world environments. If you experienced the hubbub of Pokémon Go, you witnessed augmented reality in action. This mobile game allowed users to view the world around them through their smartphone cameras while projecting game items, including onscreen icons, score, and ever-elusive Pokémon creatures, as overlays that made them seem as if those items were right in your real-life neighborhood. The game’s design was so immersive that it sent millions of kids and adults alike walking through their real-world backyards in search of virtual prizes.
Google SkyMap is another well-known AR app. It overlays information about constellations, planets and more as you point the camera of your smartphone or tablet toward the heavens. Wikitude is an app that looks up information about a landmark or object by simply pointing at it using your smartphone’s camera.
But AR is more than just smartphone fun. It’s a technology that finds uses in more serious matters, from business to warfare to medicine.
The goal of Augmented Reality:
The goal of Augmented Reality is to create a system in which the user cannot tell the difference between the real world and the virtual augmentation of it. Today Augmented Reality is used in entertainment, military training, engineering design, robotics, manufacturing, and other industries.
VR (Virtual Reality)
Virtual reality (VR) is a simulated experience that can be similar to or completely different from the real world. Applications of virtual reality can include entertainment (i.e. gaming) and educational purposes (i.e. medical or military training). Other, distinct types of VR style technology include augmented reality and mixed reality. Virtual Reality’s most immediately-recognizable component is the head-mounted display (HMD). Human beings are visual creatures, and display technology is often the single biggest difference between immersive Virtual Reality systems and traditional user interfaces. It is the use of computer technology to create a simulated environment. Unlike traditional user interfaces, VR places the user inside an experience. Instead of viewing a screen in front of them, users are immersed and able to interact with 3D worlds. By simulating as many senses as possible, such as vision, hearing, touch, even smell, the computer is transformed into a gatekeeper to this artificial world. The only limits to near-real VR experiences are the availability of content and cheap computing power.
Amazing uses of Virtual Reality
- Recruitment & Training
- Work collaboration in the workspace
- Pain Management
- Creating ideas and forecasting trends
- Training medical students
- Treatment of PTSD (Post Trauma Stress Disorder)
- Training on Social Cognition to Manage Autism
- Managing and treating anxiety disorder
- Therapy for paraplegics
Goals of Virtual Reality
- dystopic, making us a possible world that should be avoided
- empathic, making us experience life as others already do
- realistic, preparing us for how life could unfold soon and letting us refine our skills for difficult moments
- pleasurable, making us experience joys that would otherwise be difficult
- challenging, making us confront gradually and safely some of our fears
MR (Mixed Reality)
Mixed reality (MR) is the merging of real and virtual worlds to produce new environments and visualizations, where physical and digital objects co-exist and interact in real-time. Mixed reality does not exclusively take place in either the physical or virtual world, but is a hybrid of reality and virtual reality, encompassing both augmented reality and augmented virtuality via immersive technology. Mixed reality is the result of blending the physical world with the digital world. Mixed reality is the next evolution in human, computer, and environment interaction and unlocks possibilities that before now were restricted to our imaginations. It is made possible by advancements in computer vision, graphical processing power, display technology, and input systems.
At present, Mixed Reality (MR) systems are still being developed and fine-tuned. This technology is still not as widely available as separate VR and AR devices or software, although there are some real-world examples of mixed reality technologies in use today. Mixed reality devices like the Microsoft HoloLens 2 aren’t found everywhere just yet, although, with a steadily increasing number of applications and growing use in certain industrial and commercial fields, they certainly could be in the not-too-distant future. As we’ll see, most of the current use cases of mixed reality technologies are bespoke to a specific task or objective and have different applications within different fields or sectors. They are:
- Education
- Engineering
- Healthcare
- Entertainment