Most of us must have heard of Virtual Reality and Augmented Reality but might think it’s for passionate gamers who love to have fun with their apps and games, but in recent times, it’s being used in many different sectors of life for the benefit of humankind.
AR and VR have come so far from just science-fiction ideas to science-based reality.
Augmented reality enhances the real world using digitally produced perceptual overlays. According to ZDNet, the first head-mounted AR display was created at Harvard in 1968, but it was until 2008 that AR saw its first commercial application. This was in the form of a BMW magazine ad that allowed users to hold a printed page in front of a computer camera to produce an on-screen image, and since then AR became a major technology in the form of QR codes that can unlock AR contents and was used by marketers. AR acquired its major customers through gaming Pokemon Go.
Virtual reality is a broad term for a multi-sensory computer-generated experience that allows users to experience and interact with a simulated environment. Virtual Reality Society said that the technology has thematic roots in the stereoscopic viewers of the 19th Century. By the 1990s VR became a popular culture cause of a movie like “the lawnmower man” (1992) and also early gaming headsets from Nintendo and Sega.
Some of the industries that will be affected by the use of AR and VR are Advertising, Online Shopping, Mobile, Automotive, Real estate, Enterprise Training, Health Care, Market Outlook, Education, and Grocery shopping.
Many informed commentators in the field/subject have concluded that augmented reality will have a greater impact than virtual reality because the VR environment demands its user’s complete attention naturally, which makes it not suitable for real-life interaction, except the digital world. But AR has the ability to act as an on-call co-pilot to everyday life, coherently integrating into daily real-world interactions, made possible by the AR cloud. The AR cloud is a digital copy of the real world that can be accessed by any user at any time.
How to unlock the great potentials of AR is left to the UX designers, to think about how to integrate AR with daily life to improve its productivity, efficiency, or quality of experiences.
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