Imagine this: You walk into your house and all the walls and ceilings are covered in gold, you have a massive flat screen TV on the wall, everything is completely clean, the kitchen counters are all granite, everything is just really nice. But none of it is real, when you take off your glasses, everything goes back to normal.
Sooner than expected, this could be reality where we decorate our homes with not real things, but virtual things using Virtual and Augmented Reality. That’s what I’m gonna go over in this article today.
It might sound insane, but I don't think it's going to be that far off. Let me explain how and why I think it's going to happen.
As you know, virtual reality has gotten more and more popular these days, whether it's the high end Oculus Rift or HTC Vive you hook up to your computer, or the kind you just use with your phone. We're even getting true augmented reality with Microsoft's Hololens, which is able to actually put opaque holograms into your field of vision.
Right now these technologies are pretty big and clunky but even still, I'm starting to see how we might get to a point where everyone uses Augmented reality practically all the time. Getting to amazing augmented reality will take longer than amazing virtual reality, but I think in the end, the two will basically combine into one. Though I'm getting a bit ahead of myself.
As I said, right now we have lots of virtual reality devices which are actually pretty incredible. Especially the HTC Vive which does room scale tracking where you can use the whole room as a game area. As time goes on, this is only going to get more and more realistic, to the point where you can use your whole house as a play area, and the headsets are completely wireless.
Similarities between Virtual reality and Augmented reality
The main idea behind Virtual Reality is that it completely replaces your surrounding environment. Right now at least, you have to put on those big headsets that cover your eyes, so you can't see what's truly going on around you.
Augmented reality on the other hand, like the name suggests, adds to the real world, without necessarily replacing it altogether. When you put on Hololens for example, you still see the room you're in, but there are virtual objects as well and the technology uses the information about the room, so these virtual objects can actually interact with the real room.
It's not that difficult to see how Augmented reality might improve over the years, going from only being able to add rudimentary objects to the room, to more realistic and interactive objects, then to actually useful things like a fully functional virtual TV. Imagine that, instead of having a huge TV that you mount to the wall, you just put on a pair of glasses and it puts a virtual TV on the wall instead. With all that, I don't think it's hard to imagine when Augmented reality can eventually replace anything and everything in your field of view. Not only do you have a virtual TV, but virtual paintings, virtual wallpaper, virtual computer monitors, whatever.
It kind of sounds awesome and sad at the same time like you'd be looking at all this awesome stuff and none of it is real. I can imagine this dystopian future where everyone just has the same blank furniture, all the walls, couches and tables are completely white, but you have these contact lenses that makes everything look different. I mean I doubt that would actually happen, but I could totally see maybe everyone in the future having a room in their house that's a designated "virtual room" that you could change into whatever, and I think that would actually be pretty cool.
You might be thinking that it just sounds like pure virtual reality at that point, I guess you're right, which is what I meant by virtual and augmented reality combining into one. I think eventually, augmented reality is going to catch up to "virtual reality" headsets so they become obsolete. Once that happens, you'll have one device that can either project only some stuff in front of you, as well as just replacing everything altogether. But of course, it would still take the real world into account so that you don't bump into anything.
I think that's still a long way off though, simply because virtual reality is so much easier to accomplish, technically speaking, you just take some lenses and a good screen, bam! you are put into a virtual world. Even phones can do it these days, which should tell you something. On the other hand, true augmented reality is not so easy. There aren't any consumer grade headsets for AR out there, except for Hololens which is still a developer kit and insanely expensive.
Even though Hololens has amazing tracking and hologram quality, it's pretty low resolution and only takes up a tiny fraction of your field of view. If you've been following Apple at all, they talked about how they're doing a heavy push for "Augmented Reality". But to be honest, the kind of AR they're showing off isn't what I would call true augmented reality. It's basically just using your phone's camera to look at the world on a phone's screen, then adding things to it. It’s not even remotely close to Hololens.
In any case, I guess we must start somewhere but what about some other cool uses for augmented reality?
The possibilities are pretty much endless, even outside your house or just walking down the street, you could get information about shops you're going past, like reviews, store hours, that sort of thing. Google developed a feature that does just that with their "Google Lens" software for phones.
It just uses your phone, but it's definitely more augmented reality than Pokemon Go. You hold your phone up to some shops or whatever, and it uses things like your phone location, compass, maybe even reading text to figure out what store you're looking at, then it displays all sorts of information.
I'm just not sure that would be any easier than looking it up yourself. Also, in the future, maybe there will even be some sort of social aspect to augmented reality, like people can choose to have social media profiles show up above them. Personally, I think that would be pretty creepy and I wouldn't want that, but you just know that there are plenty of people out there who would do it.
What about when you're just driving down the road, there could be lots of uses there. The first thing that comes to mind is GPS directions, where it can tell you exactly what lane to be in or where to turn without taking your eyes off the road because it's all projected right in the road. Though by that time, we all might already have self-driving cars anyway.
In Conclusion
I think that's enough crazy rant for now. Think too much about this stuff you'll go nuts but I'm sure you guys have lots of thoughts on all this, we can discuss about that down in the comments below. If you enjoyed this article, don’t forget to smash that upvote button down below.
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