Current futurists, scientists and philosophers consider that many ideas attributed usually as Si-Fi will happen eventually some day, due to the exponential growth of the computational power of the computers. This includes autonomous robots and virtual agents , fully immersed virtual and augmented reality, mind upload and many others.
The virtual reality technologies used these days are not capable yet to generate fully immersed virtual environments. The immersion concept describes the degree of reality, which the user experiences while perceiving and interacting with the virtual environment. The immersion effect is rather a psychological term and is hard to be measured formally. People tend to understand different things behind the term and provide inconsistent answers to questions about the degree of immersion in result of a virtual reality interaction.
It is obvious, however that the immersion effect is dependent on the technologies used to feed the virtual reality stream into the human brain.
When talk about virtual reality it is often considered as part of a broather concept called virtual reality continuum , which includes different combinations between the real environment and artificially generated one. Paul Milgram proposes a taxonomy model , describing the virtual reality continuum:
The original diagram here is “augmented” by me with the relation between the Virtual Reality continuum and the mobility continuum. A major challenge in front of the virtual reality technologies is the requirement for greater computational power , which requires bigger devices, and more consumption power leading to less mobility. The applications positioned closer to the real environment in the VR continuum requires greater mobility.
Virtual reality
In general the Virtual Reality(VR) concept describes computer generated environment, where the agent(a person) is immersed into. The agent (usually) interacts with the virtual environment to perform different tasks. There are many applications and technologies in this field,already. The VR concept is used in many computer games, MMORG, military and education areas.
Augmented reality
The augmented reality (AR) term describes concept, where the real world is augmented by virtual objects perceived by the observes. The virtual objects are perceived by the observer as they are part of the real environment.He (observer) not only see the virtual objects, but also may interact with them.
AR technologies may be used in engineering, education ,entertainment ,medicine and in any other aspect of our lives. The AR idea is not new and there are companies and universities in the field for a long time.
Most of the potential applications for AR solutions requires the AR to happen, while the observer operates (and move) in the real environment, which requires mobile displaying technologies.
There is a great boost in the mobile industry lately and most of the businesses are looking toward enriching their mobile portfolio or presence in the mobile world. We have an increased computational power of the current mobile CPUs/GPUs (Snapdragon Qualcom QSD8x50 , Tegra) and it pushes the AR hype to grow very fast. They (mobile devices) turned to be a candidate AR platform capable to merge the virtual and real and feed it into the human brain (still using the our standard vision channel)
It is interesting that according to Juniper Research the market of AR apps is estimated to $2 million currently and could grow to $732 million in 2014.
Metaio ,Total Immersion, AcrossAir,Layar, Wikitude, Yelp, PresseLite to name a few are companies providing apps using some kind of AR functionality. Check out their web sites to see demo videos of AR apps on mobile devices.
Augmented Virtuality
The latest announcement from Microsoft’s Bing Streets View is a good example (still not very immersive :)) for Augmented Virtuality (e.g. computer generated environment enhanced with real-world images )
The Augmented Virtuality concept is about computer generated virtual environment augmented by physical objects. Physical objects are presented in the virtual environment by virtual copies of the physical objects. The users of the system may interact with physical objects in real time by manipulating their virtual copies. Some authors talk about Mirror Worlds , which seems to me is just a private case of Augmented Virtuality.
We are living in an interesting times, where the computational power of the computers grows in an exponential rate (according to the Moore’s low) and we will experience a real mixed environment, soon. Eventually years from now the words “virtual” and “real” will just vanish from our language just because they will be undistinguishable from our plugged-in nervous systems.
