This is my article that was published in the Technology Section of our school magazine, "The Reason", 2020 edition.

With every technological leap forward, the digital world, once only existing on our screens, seems to be seeping out into our world and meeting us where we stand, blurring the line between what’s real and what’s virtual, and changing reality as we know it for ever. Augmented Reality (AR) may soon become the reality we live in.

 

AR is the overlaying of digital elements – like sparkling stars and other sensory projections – onto our real-world environment. For example, “AccuVein” is an AR app built for medical students that allows them to perform virtual surgeries for practice. AR was first created in 1992 by Louis Rosenberg who created the first fully immersive AR system for the U.S Air Force Research Laboratory. However, AR wasn’t used for commercial purposes until 2008. In that year, BMW used AR to help sell cars to customers by allowing them to view the cars in full 3D in their own backyards before buying. Since then, AR has seen rapid use in other fields (medical, engineering, gaming, etc), and is slowly changing our reality – and at the same time, our lives.

If you’ve ever dug around the internet, you’ve most likely came across a game or a business making use of AR for either entertainment or marketing purposes, but medical and educational uses are not far behind. Businesses use AR to allow customers to try on outfits or makeup on a virtual body or face to see how it would look before actually buying. On the other hand, AR use in education seeks to create a more immersive experience. For example, some history lessons allow students to travel back in time by using an AR app to visit different time periods. AR is also used for medical purposes to give trainee students virtual surgeries for practice and real surgeons the ability to plan on a virtual body before actually performing the surgery. To put it simply, AR has and will continue to revolutionize the way we live.

 

Use of AR in the future will surge as more people embrace the technology. There are already 74 million AR users today, and this is predicted to increase to 83.2 million by 2022 according to Poplar. In the future, AR could be used to show fitness graphs in real time or to run diagnostics on machinery without the need for user manuals. However, AR will continue to see most of its progress in education, business, and entertainment. Students in future will be able to interact with virtual pictures in classrooms, perform practicals without the equipment actually being there, and more. Businesses could use AR to give customers a more interactive online-shopping experience by displaying the item in full 3d in the customer’s house. As for entertainment, AR could take gaming to an entirely new level as the player’s house becomes the game environment itself, making games more interactive and immersive.

Lastly, AR could be mixed with Virtual Reality (VR) for an even more interactive experience. Virtual Reality simulates an experience and then drops the player into the middle of it using a headset that allows them to interact inside that simulated world. We could mix VR with AR by using the VR controllers to allow the player to interact with virtual AR elements. For example, instead of just looking at a virtual AR dog, if you mix VR, you would be able to pet it too. From this point, our reality could easily be manipulated and twisted in ways unimaginable today (imagine playing life-sized chess with dinosaurs or looking up at flying cars that aren’t even there), and we better get used to it. AR is the future of our reality.