AR(Augmented Reality)

What is Augmented Reality?

In the past couple years technology has developed in a way that has made many of the past generation dumbfounded. We have all heard people saying, “It felt like yesterday when all my phone could do was send text message and call.”  Over a short period of time that has changed drastically. Technologies thought to be existing only in Sci-Fi films are now slowly starting to appear in our daily lives. One example for this is AR or Augmented Reality. If you have never heard of it, augmented reality is generating an image via a computer and projecting it to the real world (in the view of the user). To make this simpler here is an example. You may have seen the movie Iron Man, and what he uses to control the suit is a form of AR.  

Well thanks to technological advances in the field of AR this is a technology already being produced and used (granted on a much smaller scale).  There are many apps and other technologies that use AR. In this post I will give examples of this that have become part of many of our lives.  

Real World Applications

How many people do you know play Pokémon Go? This is an app that uses AR. If you ever noticed on the top right corner it gives the option of using AR or not

 

 

When you choose AR, the Pokémon is shown on your phone but with your surroundings in the real world. 

Another known example for this is Google Glass  

 

This very cool technology is another form of AR, it has a set of functions that run on the display screen and that is the extremely small piece of glass you see in the front. In short it resembles AR because it is an open-ended screen and is basically floating around your surroundings.

The final example for AR is used in the new BMW cars. It is used for giving directions and displaying speed

 

Again, this is AR because the display is shown on the real road ahead of the driver. In the car, only the driver can see the AR display and this allows the driver to know where to go and the speed. This is useful for obvious safety reasons and is pretty cool at the same time. 

Concluding Thoughts

AR will most likely be something that we will use daily in the near future. It is not far-fetched anymore to think that people will be walking around wearing a computer and interacting with things that a bystander cannot see. This technology already exists and once it’s cheaper it will probably be more common. AR is definitely something that is going to only advance as the years pass. We can only wait and see what other brilliant things are going to be produced in this field.