Augmented Reality – Virtual Reality that’s Real Today

This is not virtual reality which is 100% simulated environment and characters. But it’s close and more useful in the real world.  If you’ve watched any of Arnold Schwarzenegger’s Terminator movies where they show what the terminator sees from his perspective (displaying data while looking at a person or object) that’s the general idea of what AR is.  

As you look at a building or object through a sensitized pair of goggles, you get real time information related to what you are looking at. It could be a street or a landmark and your goggle displays information about it and your location using GPS navigation. Or you could look at an artifact in a museum and get information readout on your goggles.  

Changing the Way We Look at Things and People

AR straddles somewhere between the immersive computer-generated graphics that have high realism on one end of the spectrum and the real world at the other end. Superimposing graphics, images and information as needed over real images we see through cameras constitutes Augmented Reality. Just like Virtual Reality, you need a pair of Goggles or heads-up display screens in a helmet that are transparent enough for you to see normally through them.  

But the glass surface is actually an LCD screen that can display information depending on what you are looking at. You could be looking at a person and your goggle shows you some information about the person taken from a social networking site or remote database.  CIA and FBI operatives would love this. You could look at a landmark and you get information about it and your exact location from GPS data.  Tourists would be delighted with this. You could look at a car and the goggle display technical data about it.  Car aficionados and prospective buyers would like that as well.  

Games and More Games

Video games have been with us for almost 40 years now and they’ve grown to be sophisticated right down to your portable mobile gaming handsets and mobile phones. There are already games using AR technology in mobile phones with even the most rudimentary imaging system or camera.  Set the camera against a table and you see characters walking or battling it out on the table from your screen. Some use printed surfaces in books which the AR application on your handset can detect and display images accordingly.  This gaming technique saves the application some computing time to render 2D polygons for backgrounds and thus minimize file sizes.  

Military Application

The military already has projects in AR. The concept is about providing troops with instant information about their target surroundings in real time. This includes displaying on their goggles exact enemy locations that would otherwise be hidden from view without it. It can show egress points when entering structures, something like an X-ray vision or night vision. AR can assist them to skirt through mines and booby trapped locations.  

What is Needed

Goggles that display the information superimposed on what you see through them as well as mobile phone screens set in camera mode are prerequisites to the AR technology.  The intelligence could be in the mobile phone or a belt-strapped device that can communicate with remote databases through WiFi. The goggles can eventually evolve into simple eyeglasses. AR is still in its infancy but the promise is there alright.  GP