We hear about new advances in technology every day – from intelligent personal assistants like Amazon’s Alexa to self-driving cars companies like the one Google is creating and everything in between. Today, smartphones are at the centre of our digital lives. It may be hard to imagine life without one, but ten years from now, a new device may take the place of the smartphone.
If you haven’t seen one in person, you’ve probably at least seen commercials for virtual reality headsets. Now, imagine having a device that looks like ordinary eyeglasses but with settings for virtual and augmented reality. How will augmented reality glasses in business shape the future?
The impact of augmented reality and mixed reality, and their use in business:
Nowadays, businesses are constantly on the hunt for ways to transform how they operate. However, in order to make the business more efficient and productive, strategic planning and process improvement are key. By planning in advance and analysing the bespoke needs of the business, it will become clear what changes need to be made and where augmented reality glasses can be used.
What is virtual, augmented, and mixed reality?
What exactly do the terms virtual reality, augmented reality, and mixed reality mean?
Virtual reality (VR): Virtual reality is an artificial environment that is created with software and presented to the user in such a way that the user suspends belief and accepts it as a real environment. Often, these environments are created with computers, but can also be composed of 360-degree videos, also known as immersive or spherical videos.
Augmented reality (AR): The origin of the word augmented is ‘augment’, which means to add something. Augmented reality glasses use the integration of digital overlays with the user’s environment in real-time. Unlike virtual reality, which creates a totally artificial environment, augmented reality uses the existing environment and overlays new information on top of it.
Mixed reality (MR): Also referred to as hybrid reality, mixed reality augments the real world with virtual objects that aim to look as if they are really placed within that world.
Extended Reality (XR): Extended Reality is a newer term that refers to a wide array of current and future spatial computing technologies.
History
Many people think that virtual reality, augmented reality glasses, and MR are new concepts, but interestingly, the concept of virtual reality has been around for decades. In the 1950s, a cinematographer named Morton Heilig envisioned a theatre experience that would stimulate all senses and in 1960, he built a prototype of this vision called the Sensorama. It had a stereoscopic display, fans, odour emitters, stereo speakers, and a moving chair. Ivan Sutherland invented the first virtual reality and augmented reality head-mounted display (HMD) in 1968.
A lot has happened in between, and during the 1990s, there was virtual reality and Sega VR, although it never made it to consoles. Google Street View came out in 2007, Facebook bought Oculus for 2 billion dollars in 2014, and Google invested $500 million into Magic Leap in 2016. All that to say that the progression of virtual reality, augmented reality, and mixed reality has exploded in the past 10 years and will only continue to grow.
Let’s take a deeper look at each of these technologies and their practical uses:
Virtual Reality Technologies
Virtual reality is one created by computers. It allows you to experience and interact with a 3D world that isn’t real by putting on a head-mounted display and some form of input tracking. Virtual reality experiences can be created through tools such as Unreal Engine, Unity, or A-Frame, the latter being a web framework that is easy to learn and fast for web developers to pick up.
Virtual reality is experienced through a number of devices, including the HTC Vive and Oculus, geared for gaming audiences. GoPro’s Omni is a solution for capturing, stitching, and publishing virtual reality content. Cheaper options include Google Cardboard, which can be used with any phone, and Google Daydream, which is a faster, high-resolution version of Cardboard but is only available on select phones.
Virtual Reality in Business Use Cases
Virtual reality is a huge thing in the gaming industry, and it’s just an overall fascinating experience to put on one of these headsets. But apart from that, you may be wondering if there are other uses of virtual reality in businesses.
The most obvious industry that could successfully use virtual reality is entertainment. Aside from video game lovers, imagine a consumer experiencing a travel destination or “being at” a sporting event without ever having to leave home.
But there are other uses for virtual reality in business. For example, virtual reality could be used in staff training for professionals who work in industries like real estate or construction. Real estate, architecture, and construction businesses could use virtual reality to show what a finished environment would look like. They could also be placed in real-world scenarios and through these immersive experiences, have better memory retention, according to a paper published through Syracuse University.
Virtual reality can be used to simulate working with expensive equipment in an array of dangerous environments without any of the risks.
Virtual reality has also taken off in the healthcare sector with a transition from trials and pilots to general use. It has been adopted to help treat patients with anxiety disorders by getting a better idea of how they react to stress-inducing situations while remaining safe in sound inside a virtual environment. It’s even being used to help diagnose patients with visual or cognitive impairments, via eye tracking.
Augmented Reality Technologies
Augmented reality adds something to the existing real-life environment. There are several different augmented reality glasses patterns, and essentially, the user is adding a layer of data in front of their eyes that may be somewhat transparent.
Marker-based AR, also called Image Recognition, uses a camera and some type of visual marker, such as a QR/2D code, to produce a result only when the marker is sensed by a reader. Markerless AR is most commonly used for mapping directions, finding nearby businesses, and other location-centric mobile applications. Projection-based AR works by projecting artificial light onto real world surfaces. Superimposition-based AR either partially or fully replaces the original view of an object with a newly augmented view of that same object.