What is Virtual Reality, and how is it different from Augmented Reality?
As humans, we can imagine. And we can imagine a lot. In fact, throughout the history of mankind, we have always imagined more than we have lived, more than what we’re capable of, and more than what’s possible. But now, we can finally live in the worlds we have imagined, for maybe the first time ever.
For centuries, we’ve always imagined newer and more immersive ways to transport us into exotic and beautiful fantasy worlds. We were always imagining adventures in magical worlds; they allowed a person to escape from reality and experience something extraordinary. But only recently has this dream been realized with the help of technology.
Why live in boring old reality, when you can live in any reality of your choice? This is the essence of VR, which seeks to immerse the user in various interesting and interactive environments.
What’s VR? (And how to use it)
Just wear the headset and you will be transported to a completely different world! But how is this possible, you might ask? The concept is really simple. You strap this visor box onto your face, and it will display a 3D virtual environment, right in front of your eyes, which will completely replace your vision of the real world. Not only that, you can turn your head around to look at the full 360° view, control virtual objects with the controllers in your hands, and even move around in the virtual world. Additionally, you can listen to directional stereo audio by wearing headphones, to complete the illusion that you are in the virtual world. Thus, VR offers a completely immersive and interactive experience for anyone who wants to escape from reality for a bit.
Why VR?
But we already have 4K TVs and even our handheld smartphones that can show us different worlds. Why do we need VR then? The limitations are that these only take a small fraction of our total field of view and they can only show us 2D media. While these will do the job just fine from a convenience standpoint, what if we want the most immersive experience possible? This is where Virtual Reality comes in, as the screen fills the entire vision of the user so that they are completely drawn into the content they are watching. VR can give us realistic, interactive 3D visuals of all 360 degrees of the virtual environment, an experience that you won’t get by any other means. More importantly, VR has limitless potential and is only limited by our imagination, which is itself unlimited. Even today, the high-end VR experience is so realistic that it can make the wearer forget that he/she is actually in a virtual world. Hence, it will be exciting to see how it gets even better in the future.
Just to clarify, let’s not get ahead of ourselves when hearing the marketing that “VR takes you into a different world”. No, they’re not wormholes and they don’t warp space-time to get you into different places, all they do is provide the visuals and the audio feed to fool our brain into thinking so.
Okay, Virtual Reality is a promising and powerful new technology, but what do we do with it? One of the biggest uses of consumer VR is gaming. VR chat. VR meetings can bring the office to people’s homes, adding different new flavours in terms of environments to overcome the monotony of being stuck in the same room all day. Professionals working remotely can be very productive by using virtual tools to communicate through an interactive VR interface. For enterprise and business use, is where VR really shines as it can be used to experience realistic simulations for training purposes. This can be especially useful when trying to simulate tasks and scenarios which may be dangerous, critical, or expensive if done in real life. Examples include military combat simulations, driving and flying simulations, etc.
But despite the hype and momentum that VR has gathered in recent years, it still remains out of reach for the general public, especially outside of first-world countries. The high computing power requirements, high cost, and lesser availability of VR media and game titles are some of the barriers to entry that are responsible for this. Most importantly, it can be expensive to get into VR as some of the popular headsets today like The Oculus Quest 2 or the Valve Index all cost substantially more than the average Indian’s monthly salary. Adding to it is the fact that as of today, there are no absolutely compelling reasons yet for mainstream market adoption of consumer VR, especially here in India, where niche products are known to struggle and the cost barrier to entry is even higher compared to our purchasing power.
What’s AR?
Creating virtual worlds is all fine, but our own world is already a beautiful place. So why not just build on top of it? That’s exactly what AR does. It adds virtual elements on to real-world surroundings.
How this is achieved is by overlaying the required virtual elements on top of the camera feed of real-world photos or videos. This usually involves a camera and a smart device with a flat-screen like a smartphone, rather than a headset.
It is mainly used to add useful information on top of real-world media for a more insightful, interactive, and engaging experience. Since the user is still focused on the real world and not fully distracted from it, means that it is safer to use in applications like smart HUD displays on car windshields and for navigation on smartphones.
AR has immense potential for use in sectors like Education, healthcare, entertainment, and defence.
One popular example is the mobile game Pokémon GO which became an overnight sensation as it lets users catch Pokémon in real-world locations using AR. Another great use case is in education, where a mobile app can be used to scan pictures on textbooks to display useful videos and animations on top of it. Other use cases include interior designing, prototype model visualizations, direction signs and arrow overlays for live navigation, etc.
Key differences and comparisons:
One of the main differences between VR and AR is that in VR, the virtual world completely replaces the real world, whereas, in AR, both worlds exist alongside each other. As a result, VR is much more immersive than AR. This means that VR users will have to be more aware of their surroundings while AR is safer and more convenient.
VR needs a headset, while AR just needs a camera-enabled smart device like a smartphone or a tablet. While Smartphone VR introduced around 2016, was a cheaper gateway into VR, it quickly died away as it did not offer the complete VR experience due to a smartphone’s limited capabilities. Hence, VR is more expensive compared to AR, mainly due to the cost of the headset and other associated hardware peripherals.
Future scope and conclusion:
You’ve probably heard of all the hype about the Metaverse, which has caused the general public’s awareness about VR to skyrocket in recent times. Meta believes that this will be the future of the internet, where people can live, work and interact with each other in VR, via virtual avatars roaming around in virtual environments.
But this is just the start of something even greater than we could imagine. We believe we could be on the brink of a VR/AR revolution, quite similar to how smartphones suddenly took over to render our basic keypad phones obsolete within just a few years. Now imagine the same effect in the near future with AR smart glasses, where the user is wearing a smart screen 24X7 and can watch and do everything he wants right in front of him, displayed on the glasses itself. The user can not only watch movies on the go, but also get actual work done by using hand gestures and actions to navigate through the UI and to complete tasks. This is possible thanks to an array of sensors on the glasses with a compact yet powerful processor making it all work behind the scenes. What’s even more interesting is when these smart AR glasses gradually drop down in price to somewhat affordable levels over the years so that there will come a point when the technology becomes commonplace and almost everyone will own one, just like the case with smartphones these days.
Whatever happens, it is clear that immersive technology is the next step forward, which both the investors and manufacturers will be keen to capitalize on in the coming years. As ARM technology and other mobile chips become more powerful and efficient, and as the energy densities of batteries keep increasing, we are slowly inching towards a future where VR meetings will become the norm and wearing smart AR glasses every day becomes the new normal.
If nothing else, we can be proud of one thing: our ability to not only dream or imagine something so outrageously, ridiculously, seemingly impossible, and yet, somehow, still make it happen. And that’s what has brought us VR.
This forms a significant milestone in humanity’s pursuit of innovation and excellence. And we deserve this, don’t we? While we are capable of imagining many worlds at once, why should we keep living in only one?
References:
Due credit goes to Mr. Arun Prasath S, whose LinkedIn profile was the source for the last image.
We thank him for his inspiring social media posts that have helped share knowledge on the topic to thousands of his followers.
