Augmented reality is used to either visually change natural environments in some way or to provide additional information to users. The primary benefit of AR is that it manages to blend digital and three-dimensional (3D) components with an individual's perception of the real world. AR has a variety of uses, from helping in decision-making to entertainment.
Boeing Computer Services Research employee Thomas Caudell coined the term augmented reality in 1990 to describe how the head-mounted displays that electricians use when assembling complicated wiring harnesses worked. One of the first commercial applications of augmented reality technology was the yellow first down marker that began appearing in televised football games sometime in 1998. Today, Google Glass, smartphone games and heads-up displays (HUDs) in car windshields are the most well-known consumer AR products. But the technology is also used in many industries, including healthcare, public safety, gas and oil, tourism and marketing.
Augmented reality can be delivered in a variety of formats, including within smartphones, tablets and glasses. AR delivered through contact lenses is also being developed. The technology requires hardware components, such as a processor, sensors, a display and input devices. Mobile devices already typically have this hardware available, with sensors including cameras, accelerometers, Global Positioning System (GPS) and solid-state compasses. This helps make AR more accessible to the everyday user. A GPS is used to pinpoint the user's location, and its compass is used to detect device orientation, for example.
Augmented reality apps are written in special 3D programs that enable developers to tie animation or contextual digital information in the computer program to an augmented reality marker in the real world. When a computing device's AR app or browser plugin receives digital information from a known marker, it begins to execute the marker's code and layer the correct image or images.
VR is a virtual environment created with software and presented to users in such a way that their brain suspends belief long enough to accept a virtual world as a real environment. Virtual reality is primarily experienced through a headset with sight and sound.
The biggest difference between AR and VR is that augmented reality uses the existing real-world environment and puts virtual information on top of it, whereas VR completely immerses users in a virtually rendered environment. While VR puts the user in a new, simulated environment, AR places the user in a sort of mixed reality.
AR technology continues to grow as the popularity and familiarization of apps and games like Pokemon Go or retail store AR apps increase. The expansion of 5G networks may make it easier to support cloud-based augmented reality experiences, for example, by providing AR applications with higher data speeds and lower latency.
Apple continues to develop and update its open source mobile augmented reality development tool set, ARKit. Companies, including Target and Ikea, use ARKit in their flagship AR shopping apps for iPhone and iPad. ARKit 6 enables users to render AR in 4K high-dynamic range, or HDR, and improves image and video capture. ARKit 6 also provides a Depth API, which uses per-pixel depth information to enable a device's camera to understand the size and shape of an object and includes scene geometry that creates a topological map of a space along with other improvements.
Augmented reality (AR) is an interactive experience that combines the real world and computer-generated content. The content can span multiple sensory modalities, including visual, auditory, haptic, somatosensory and olfactory.[1] AR can be defined as a system that incorporates three basic features: a combination of real and virtual worlds, real-time interaction, and accurate 3D registration of virtual and real objects.[2] The overlaid sensory information can be constructive (i.e. additive to the natural environment), or destructive (i.e. masking of the natural environment).[3] This experience is seamlessly interwoven with the physical world such that it is perceived as an immersive aspect of the real environment.[3] In this way, augmented reality alters one's ongoing perception of a real-world environment, whereas virtual reality completely replaces the user's real-world environment with a simulated one.[4][5]
The primary value of augmented reality is the manner in which components of the digital world blend into a person's perception of the real world, not as a simple display of data, but through the integration of immersive sensations, which are perceived as natural parts of an environment. The earliest functional AR systems that provided immersive mixed reality experiences for users were invented in the early 1990s, starting with the Virtual Fixtures system developed at the U.S. Air Force's Armstrong Laboratory in 1992.[3][6][7] Commercial augmented reality experiences were first introduced in entertainment and gaming businesses.[8] Subsequently, augmented reality applications have spanned commercial industries such as education, communications, medicine, and entertainment. In education, content may be accessed by scanning or viewing an image with a mobile device or by using markerless AR techniques.[9][10][11]
Augmented reality is used to enhance natural environments or situations and offers perceptually enriched experiences. With the help of advanced AR technologies (e.g. adding computer vision, incorporating AR cameras into smartphone applications, and object recognition) the information about the surrounding real world of the user becomes interactive and digitally manipulated. Information about the environment and its objects is overlaid on the real world. This information can be virtual. Augmented Reality is any experience which is artificial and which adds to the already existing reality.[12][13][14][15][16] or real, e.g. seeing other real sensed or measured information such as electromagnetic radio waves overlaid in exact alignment with where they actually are in space.[17][18][19] Augmented reality also has a lot of potential in the gathering and sharing of tacit knowledge. Augmentation techniques are typically performed in real-time and in semantic contexts with environmental elements. Immersive perceptual information is sometimes combined with supplemental information like scores over a live video feed of a sporting event. This combines the benefits of both augmented reality technology and heads up display technology (HUD).
In virtual reality (VR), the users' perception of reality is completely based on virtual information. In augmented reality (AR) the user is provided with additional computer- generated information within the data collected from real life that enhances their perception of reality.[20][21] For example, in architecture, VR can be used to create a walk-through simulation of the inside of a new building; and AR can be used to show a building's structures and systems super-imposed on a real-life view. Another example is through the use of utility applications. Some AR applications, such as Augment, enable users to apply digital objects into real environments, allowing businesses to use augmented reality devices as a way to preview their products in the real world.[22] Similarly, it can also be used to demo what products may look like in an environment for customers, as demonstrated by companies such as Mountain Equipment Co-op or Lowe's who use augmented reality to allow customers to preview what their products might look like at home through the use of 3D models.[23]
Augmented reality (AR) differs from virtual reality (VR) in the sense that in AR part of the surrounding environment is 'real' and AR is just adding layers of virtual objects to the real environment. On the other hand, in VR the surrounding environment is completely virtual and computer generated. A demonstration of how AR layers objects onto the real world can be seen with augmented reality games. WallaMe is an augmented reality game application that allows users to hide messages in real environments, utilizing geolocation technology in order to enable users to hide messages wherever they may wish in the world.[24] Such applications have many uses in the world, including in activism and artistic expression.[25]
Hardware components for augmented reality are: a processor, display, sensors and input devices. Modern mobile computing devices like smartphones and tablet computers contain these elements, which often include a camera and microelectromechanical systems (MEMS) sensors such as an accelerometer, GPS, and solid state compass, making them suitable AR platforms.[26][27]There are two technologies used in augmented reality: diffractive waveguides and reflective waveguides.
AR displays can be rendered on devices resembling eyeglasses. Versions include eyewear that employs cameras to intercept the real world view and re-display its augmented view through the eyepieces[34] and devices in which the AR imagery is projected through or reflected off the surfaces of the eyewear lens pieces.[35][36][37]
A head-up display (HUD) is a transparent display that presents data without requiring users to look away from their usual viewpoints. A precursor technology to augmented reality, heads-up displays were first developed for pilots in the 1950s, projecting simple flight data into their line of sight, thereby enabling them to keep their "heads up" and not look down at the instruments. Near-eye augmented reality devices can be used as portable head-up displays as they can show data, information, and images while the user views the real world. Many definitions of augmented reality only define it as overlaying the information.[38][39] This is basically what a head-up display does; however, practically speaking, augmented reality is expected to include registration and tracking between the superimposed perceptions, sensations, information, data, and images and some portion of the real world.[40]
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