Diving into Augmented Reality head first
A closer look into AR, its history, terminology, and the benefits its types offer.
July 2016 — just four short years ago, the entire world found itself captivated by Augmented Reality when the infamous game Pokémon Go was launched and rapidly exceeded all expectations. You certainly have heard of it: Dozens of people running around cities, fields, streets… — anywhere they could get, just to catch a digital pet. To this day the game is hyped beyond belief — back then, it was what kicked off Augmented Reality as a respected and recognized concept. Especially in startup and tech scenes, ever since that hype brought AR to everyone’s attention, new solutions started appearing with remarkable frequency.
But to your average person, the term carries little meaning beyond being a cool gimmick and yet another step of digitalization.
So, let’s dive into what it actually is, shall we?
The term is somewhat self-explanatory. It is another concept of reality, that is augmented, edited, or — maybe more fittingly — extended, by elements from a computer-generated digital world. Anything, that you can perceive, can be extended through Augmented Reality. Sometimes, that augmentation is merely visual, other times it can be auditory, haptic, or even somatosensory. It can be used either constructively, or destructively — adding or taking away from what you would normally experience. The goal is usually to interact and fully immerse oneself into this redesigned world.
As long as it connects the real world with a virtual one in real-time interaction, it is considered Augmented Reality.
That being said, Augmented Reality is just one step of Extended Reality — an umbrella term for any kind of Virtuality brought into Reality, from Augmented Reality, all the way to complete Virtuality (don’t worry, we fully intend on addressing the entire spectrum in its own article sooner than later!).
The History of Augmented Reality
Originally developed in the late 1960s, it was based on head-mounted displays hanging from ceilings. Those displays would portray computer graphics making the user feel as though they were in an alternate reality. Nowadays, this is likely closer to virtual reality than augmented reality, but that is a topic for the aforementioned future post.
Regardless of semantics, it was the first big step in the direction of Extended Reality. The second step was taken less than a decade later — Videoplace, a projection system combined with video cameras producing shadows on the screen, offering the interactive aspect of AR.
Augmented Reality finding its place
Tom Caudell was the man to finally coin the term in 1990, and just a few years later the first real operational Augmented Reality system, Virtual Fixtures, was created. It took until 2016 for the concept to be popularized; so as you can see, the concept has been around for far longer than the general public was aware of. And while 2016 was a huge step forward for it, most of us still do not see the full potential of AR.
Having talked about its origins, which types of AR are there now?
There are two main kinds of Augmented Reality: marker-based and markerless AR.
Marker-based Augmented Reality requires some kind of anchor, marker, to manifest into our reality. When a marker is recognized by an AR application, the digital content can be placed on top of it. This can include image-based AR, which functions as a kind of QR Code.
Markerless Augmented Reality can place a virtual object in any visible place, the object can be rotated or adjusted anywhere. It relies heavily on the device’s hardware to assemble the digital model, and is usually more demanding. Here, you will find projection and superimposition based AR.
Furthermore, there are still many other subclasses of AR left to talk about, but that might be out the scope of this article.
Especially now, that AR is on a strong upswing, you’ll see it pop up in a wide variety of fields, hardly anything has not been affected by it. Be it art, design, marketing, or education — odds are high it has been done in one way or another.
Augmented Reality carries a lot of potential that many fail to recognize
AR offers a unique experience for users to connect with brands, so naturally, the business world is curious and intrigued by what this technology has got in store. More and more companies are dipping their toes into this topic. It provides an emotional and immersive, almost magical, connection to its users.
Our solution with Augmented Reality
We’re getbaff, and we want to offer you that immersive and magical experience by making images come alive through marker-based (specifically image-based) AR — be it photos, posters or paintings, any picture can be connected to a video, allowing us to experience it in a brand new light. Now, that we offer our worldwide unique solution as a Software Development Kit, allowing brands to bring that magic to their customers and users alike, we are offering them a place to edit and create their own augmented experiences of our reality.
Did we get your curiosity going? Wondering, if you can make your product, or your personal images come alive as well? Feel free to browse through our website to see some examples, and watch yourself become baffled ;)
