When you’re playing Tennis on your Wii gaming, in a computer-simulated environment, with your motor actions reflected on a screen by your character, you are experiencing Virtual Reality or VR.
When you run around a physical space to reach and collect pokemon from a virtual realm that occupies the same physical space as you, but exists only on your mobile phone, like Pokemon Go, you are experiencing Augmented Reality or AR.
In a Mixed Reality (MR) experience, which combines elements of both AR and VR, real-world and digital objects interact. Mixed reality technology is just now starting to take off with Microsoft’s HoloLens, where developers to run apps, use his or her phone or PC’s keyboard to type text, view a live stream from the user’s point of view, and remotely capture mixed reality photos and videos.
Combining these three alternate reality concepts, we get a convergent technology, Extended Reality or XR. Extended reality (XR), an umbrella term used to describe immersive technologies that can merge the physical and virtual worlds by blending AR, VR , MR and everything in between.
Extended Reality is an idea that’s been around for a long time, though primarily in science fiction. Stanley G. Weinbaum may have been the first to envision it back in 1935, when he wrote a story, “Pygmalion’s Spectacles,” in which a professor invents a pair of goggles that allow moviegoers to taste, smell and touch imaginary things, talk to fictional characters and immerse themselves in a story that happens around them, instead of on a screen.
In 1962, a cinematographer named Morton Heilig patented Sensorama, in which a person sat in a semi-enclosed cabinet and experienced a stereoscopic 3-D display, augmented by a fan that spread aromas and a vibrating chair to simulate movement.
In the late 1970s, Massachusetts Institute of Technology researchers developed an early VR mapping simulation that allowed users to move through the streets of Aspen, Colo. In the early 1990s, Boeing researchers developed the first AR application, which guided aircraft assembly workers on how to install wiring. Since then, XR devices have grown increasingly miniaturized — and become wearable.
While Extended Reality is still in its early phase, it’s already growing explosively, so that by 2022, sales of XR technology could surpass $200 billion. Telecommunications researchers predict that the advent of 5G wireless networks, which will make it possible to transmit vast amounts of data more quickly, will help make XR even more powerful and sophisticated.
Looking at some applications of XR in the life of an average human being,
∆ Remote work: Workers can connect to the home office or with professionals located around the world in a way that makes both sides feel like they are in the same room.
∆ Retail: XR gives customers the ability to try before they buy. Watch manufacturer Rolex has an AR app that allows you to try on watches on your actual wrist, and furniture company IKEA gives customers the ability to place furniture items into their home via their smartphone.
∆ Real estate: Finding buyers or tenants might be easier if individuals can “walk through” spaces to decide if they want it even when they are in some other location.
While we consider the advantages of XR, especially in the covid-19 aftermath, developing the technology and its implementation on an everyday basis are two very different challenges.
First, XR technologies collect and process huge amounts of very detailed and personal data about what you do, what you look at, and even your emotions at any given time, which have to be protected.
Secondly, the cost of implementing the technology needs to come down; otherwise, many companies will be unable to invest in it.
Finally, it is essential that the wearable devices that allow a full XR experience are fashionable and comfortable as well as always connected, intelligent, and immersive.
There are significant technical and hardware issues to solve that include but are not limited to the display, power and thermal, motion tracking, connectivity and common illumination—where virtual objects in a real world are indistinguishable from real objects especially as lighting shifts.
Panacea 