AR 'and' VR

Not 'or'

I've seen a lot of writing that compares Virtual Reality to Augmented Reality.  They treat these two technologies as if they are in competition.  That one will win out over the other in some weird Techno Thunderdome of marketing and consumer choice.

(with various exploits, brute force and denial of services attacks instead of halberds and chainsaws, with the invisible hand of laissez faire economics bouncing the two competitors around: Two techs enter, One tech leaves!)

In reality (without Thunderdomes... so sad.), these two technologies serve different use cases with only a little overlap.  Both can exist side-by-side and most people will ultimately adopt both.

VR.  What is it good for?

Virtual reality is poised to disrupt our leisure time: how we view movies and videos, how we interact with video games and the potential for those current media to further intertwine.  People are already using the technology to add a much more visceral sense to their content.

The current big players in this space are the Facebook owned Oculus Rift, the HTC Vive and the Sony Playstation VR.  There are others from the Samsung Gear VR down to the Google Cardboard VR, but only the Rift, Vive and Plyastation VR are setup to compete with console level gaming as well as video content.

But that's it.  This technology will compete with our televisions and computers to help us escape our current reality.  They will help us pass time.  But they will not help us live our lives.  For that, we need Augmented Reality.

Augment This!

Augmented Reality will also disrupt our play time but it will also disrupt EVERYTHING ELSE.  Think of it as a new version of your smartphone screen.  But instead of having to take the screen out of your pocket and tilt your head to look at it, it is now embedded in glasses (or contacts) and is constantly updating the world you see with additional information.

This information could be GPS routes overlaid on the world you see.  It could be ratings on businesses popping up over their store fronts as you walk or drive down the street.  It could social media posts floating above the heads of everyone you pass.  It could be art in a street or business dashboards hovering in an office.  It could be complex games that combine reality with VR to truly blow our minds.  And that is only the beginning.

There is a version of this where we are all walking around in basic, drab clothes, surrounded by bare buildings with no advertising or even street numbers.  Instead, all of that lives in AR.  All of the money that we would otherwise spend on augmenting our physical lives IN reality will soon be spent augmenting our virtual selves: we truly become our avatars.

And this is more than vapor ware... kind of.  There are a few companies working on this since the demise of the first AR fashion statement from the big G.  The one with the most press right now is the Microsoft HoloLens with several tech demos.  Microsoft is betting big that this will be the tech that gets them back in the game instead of relying on Windows OEM sales and Office SaaS.

Also in the mix is something called Magic Leap.  But there seem to be some unanswered questions around it, most notably: what the frac is it?  Obviously, it's an AR headset, but it seems be offering a different way of helping you perceive depth, though without even the basic marketing explanation of how it is different.

Finally, I ran across this from Cast AR.  This appears to be focused more on the tabletop gaming set, though anything that can work there can probably do much more.

Where they meet: Hardware

In the end, the real difference is application: VR focuses on entertainment while AR focuses on everything.  From that perspective, VR should ultimately become a subset of AR.  And it will... when the hardware gets there.  Both require glasses (goggles), but the VR goggles are not see-though, but replace your reality.  AR, being an adjustable see-through system will (eventually) be able to do everything VR does while also allowing physical reality to intrude should that be what you want.  (Brace yourself now for the inevitable 'black-levels' debate between true VR headsets and VR in AR goggles.)

I'm excited for both.  I am desperate to try some of the games that VR is offering.  But I'm not $600 to $1500 desperate.  My early adopter is being triggered, but not my scroogy approach to spending.  And AR is even worse: the limited developer price for the HoloLens is $4000 if you can even get it.  Everything else is in the "price doesn't matter because we haven't built it yet" realm.

In the mean time, I'll continue to augment my reality with sub-$100 smarthome add-ons.

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