Virtual, Augmented, and Extended Reality: Understand the Differences.
Virtual, augmented, and extended reality technologies are growing rapidly. In this evolution, many people still don't know how to distinguish between them. In this text
Virtual, Augmented, and Extended Reality: Understand the Differences.
Virtual, augmented, and extended reality technologies are growing rapidly. In this evolution, many people still don't know how to distinguish between them. In this text, you will find how this entire immersion of the digital into our everyday realities came about.
Have you ever thought about how quickly our world has changed in recent decades? Technologies that were once futuristic dreams have become reality, in the wake of unprecedented transformations in computing and the refinement of virtual realities.
We can say that virtual, augmented, and extended reality technologies are the realization of an ancient dream of humanity: immersion in fictional worlds. Cinema has long played with this concept, with the evolution of special effects, and games have done a lot to bring incredible universes closer to our direct perception.
The future promises even more immersion, as you will understand by the end of this article. These technologies also interest companies, which can use VR technologies for training and enhancing customer experience every day.
Augmented Reality: From Playfulness to Technological Evolution
When Nintendo's mobile game, Pokémon Go, was released, the effect on the public was massive. The game used the front camera of smartphones to overlay reality in real-time on the screen, adding the fantastical Japanese creatures to various corners of the park or square you already knew.
The craze was also fueled by the magic of the entire process. After all, children of all ages could delight in the inclusion of a fantastic world within their realities. This is augmented reality, which can also be found today in the famous Instagram filters, with a digital apparatus superimposed on images of reality.
This technology led to the Hololens glasses, which are more robust, and paved the way for virtual reality technologies.
Virtual Reality: New Worlds Before Your Eyes
While augmented reality placed digital elements in the real world, virtual reality brought entirely different worlds through glasses placed before the eyes, even if that other world is just a distant country or the street of your childhood home.
Google Street View, with its 360º images, marked an advancement in this direction, as did Google Cardboard, which uses lenses attached to smartphones, or the Rift glasses, which allow physical movement of people within these digital worlds.
Extended Reality: A New Step
Virtual and augmented reality began to blend so much, with technologies and ideas, that a new term emerged to classify this new step: extended reality.
As the name suggests, it is a true expansion of reality, innovating even through the inclusion of innovative interactions that go beyond direct senses, simulating other sensations beyond sight and hearing through digital mechanisms.
Although the playful side is always remembered, extended reality technologies can significantly impact important sectors of our world, such as medicine, which can benefit from the blend of digital and real to perform surgeries safely.
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