Augmented Reality

and it seemed like technology would have no limits. In no time, we'd be zapping ourselves or some virtual representation of ourselves into a virtual environment and explore the Internet as if it were the real world. You probably know how that turned out. VR technology lacked the sophistication and required too many concessions to make that scenario realistic. Instead, we got simple games filled with crude polygons and other

relatively lackluster experiences. People quickly lost interest and confidence in this supposedly transformative technology. Funding for VR projects seemed to follow the flagging interest, and the computer scientists, designers, and engineers who might have been able to urge VR closer to what people wanted found themselves in search of other projects. The whole discipline was put on the back burner for many years. Flash forward a few decades and now things

are different. Not only do we have dedicated devices like the Oculus Rift or HTC Vibe to handle VR, but also an increasing number of smartphones can run various virtual reality applications as well. A secondary industry of smartphone case manufacturers sprung up around this trend, allowing you to strap a smartphone right in front of your eyeballs. A new host of games and experiences have popped up in the

VR space as well. Some of them allow you to explore an exotic landscape, while others pit you in ferocious combat against foes is like zombies or dinosaurs or zombie dinosaurs. Then there's augmented reality or a R. This technology has also been around for a few decades. Instead of substituting a computer generated world in place of our real one, augmented reality overlays digital information on top of our physical environments. Imagine looking at a wall and using an a R

app to see where all the wiring goes. It would almost seem like you had X ray vision, but really you're just looking at a digital representation of that wiring. VR and a are are big parts of what people are now calling mixed reality. Think of mixed reality as a spectrum. On one end, you have an almost completely real physical environment with just some digital information incorporated into

it in some intrinsic way. On the other end, you have a holy virtual environment filled with computer generated images and experiences. Mixed reality can incorporate all sorts of user interfaces as well, from dedicated controls to voice commands, to eye tracking technology, to mapping physical objects in the area to virtual ones in the experience. But despite this evolution of the art, mixed reality hasn't made great strides into the consumer market. It's mostly the plaything of early adopters

and people with a lot of disposable income. That's partly because the requirements for good mixed reality experiences tend to be pretty high. If you want a dedicated system, you're typically talking about a headset and controls that will run several hundred dollars, plus a sophisticated PC capable of providing the processing needed to handle the graphics and physics engines. Such a computer will run you another thousand dollars easy.

For that reason, much of the development and mixed reality has been dedicated to specific systems and integrations that aren't really suitable for the consumer market. Think of things like R and D labs and manufacturing facilities, or larger entertainment complex is like arcades or amusement parks. Smartphones are changing that, and Apple's moved to embrace the technology could be the

push the industry needs to hit the big time. It's not that other smartphones can't handle VR and A R. Android phones like Google's Pixel fall into that category as well, but Apple's devoted fan base, which is known for their app store purchases, makes all the difference. To put it another way, there are way more Android devices on the market than iOS devices. According to the analytics company stat Counter, Android devices account for more than seventy percent of all

the mobile devices in the world. Apple's iOS devices hover around twenty percent of the market. However, until Apple's app store generated more revenue than the Google Play app store, so even though there are fewer Apple devices out in the wild, Apple device owners spend more money on apps than Android owners. Google had more than three times as many gadgets and consumer hands but Apple was generating more app revenue anyway. That's a powerful story with Apple's move

to supporting augmented reality. This could mean we'll see a burst of development in the space. There's money to be made there, which will fund lots more research and development. This, in turn, could have a ripple effect across the industry and gently push it into the mainstream market. It's too early to declare mixed reality out of the woods. The technology has entered the public consciousness before, only to suffer tremendous setbacks when the general public realized the technology wasn't

nearly as far along as they had anticipated. But with more standalone devices able to support mixed reality implementations, even limited ones, we may finally see this move out of the realm of research facilities and industrial use cases and into day to day life. To learn more about mixed reality, be sure to subscribe to the tech Stuff podcast, where

we exp more topics like this in detail. You never wondered how the large Hadron collider works, or you want to know the story behind the nineteen eight three video game Crash, you should check out tech Stuff episodes publish every Wednesday and Friday. That's all for me for now, See you next time.