Augmented Reality is the blending together of the real world environment with the virtual world. To bring the virtual world into view, you need a camera and a screen to create augmented reality. The most common device for AR is your smart phone. There are many augmented reality apps which use your camera to overlay virtual features on to your screen. Augmented Reality use exploded for regular consumers back in 2016 with the popularity of the Pokémon Go app, so it is a good example to use. Augmented reality has many uses and new applications are coming out daily. Traditionally, AR was used by the military and in movies to display heads up display (HUD) information on combat glasses or screens. It was not available to regular people due to high cost and limited computing power.

Today, augmented reality is used in or being developed for a number of industries:

• Medical

• Educational

• Entertainment

• Gaming

• Shopping & Retail

• Social Media

In the medical field, augmented reality can help doctors practice complex surgeries in a digital environment by displaying live organs and body parts over top of test dummies. In school, AR can be used to display and teach concepts on a chalkboard digitally. Many games are being developed with AR, showing digital worlds on your tabletop through your phone’s camera. In the shopping and retail areas, augmented reality can place furniture digitally in your living room or show you how a piece of clothing looks on your before you buy it. Social media apps like Snapchat and Instagram have come out with AR filters, which detect the shape of your face and overlay different hairstyles, clothing, and accessories.

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 world or virtual world, but is a hybrid of augmented reality and virtual reality.^[1] To mark the difference: Augmented reality takes place in the physical world, with information or objects added virtually like an overlay; Virtual Reality immerses you in a fully virtual world without the intervention of the physical world.

There are many practical applications of mixed reality, including design, entertainment, military training, and remote working. There are also different display technologies used to facilitate the interaction between users and mixed reality applications.