Written by Jeanne Raynaud and Raphael Nachar
We have all heard of
Pokemon GO, a smartphone game that allows us to see imaginary creatures. On the
screen, you can see the ground in front of you, but with a slight difference
with reality… A strange creature is looking at you.
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Pokemon
GO, Augmented Reality in our pockets.
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Augmented reality is different from virtual
reality. Indeed, the first consists in superimposing virtual data on the real
world while the second is a complete immersion of a user in a virtual
environment.
In “augmented reality” the most important part
is actually “reality”. This technology has to remain discreet to work at best.
It must not interfere with our general perception of the world.
There are many possibilities for using such
technology. Design, education, driving, flight and military training, or just
for fun!
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Near-infrared
vein finder, medical use of AR
An example of
medical use of augmented reality is Near-infrared vein finders. This device
helps visual perception of a patient's veins. It uses near-infrared light to
detect veins underneath the skin and project a real-time image of them on the
arm. The veins can be located accurately before making a blood test or an
injection.
.
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However, as with most ubiquitous computing,
there is a risk of getting lost in an invasive digital world, restricting too
much our perception of the real world.
Indeed, augmented reality still faces many
problems. First of all, there may be environmental problems. In fact, excess
sunlight or fog can affect the proper functioning of an application using
augmented reality and therefore affect the user's perception. For example, it
can negatively affect a tourist visit in augmented reality and ruin the users'
experience
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Illustration of
the possible use of augmented reality in a car.
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But also, there may be problems related to
confidentiality. Indeed, augmented reality glasses such as google glass need a
camera to work. This camera can then be used to film people without their
knowledge. This is one of the problems that caused the Google Glass failure.
To conclude, the challenge of augmented reality
is to find the right place. It can upgrade our perception, but it must never
obstruct it.
For more:
Sources :
Lecture 2
of “Psychology of Pervasive Computing”, Aino Ahtinen and Aparajita Chowdhury,
3.9.2017, Tampere University of Technology
Great blog post!
ReplyDeleteToday, augmented reality is not utilised much in everyday life and it still has much potential. It opens up a huge amount of possibilities for a wide range of industries. It takes time for a new technology to become popular.
For example, mobile payment technology has been there for almost 20 years. Many companies have tried popularising the technology with their own solutions over the years, but they have been failing until quite recently when Apple and Google gained success in popularising their mobile payment applications.
Hopefully agumented reality technology advances and we can see more great AR applications soon!
-Otto
Thank you for this post. It provides a nice short overview to AR.
ReplyDeleteVR is a big topic for several years. But for now both, the hard- and software for VR is quiet expensive. It all comes down to the degree of detail we are accustomed to and which is expensive to develop and compute. With AR, we minimize this problem as we just add manageable amaounts of content. Therefore it is much easier to integrate in portable day-to-day devices.
Although I hope that my doctor will never need AR for detecting the position of my veins, I hope we will see smart AR applications much more in the near future.
-Robert Fuhrmann
I liked a lot the understanding of the risk that augmented reality could bring to our lives, we already have a lot of kind of distraction and this could be really catastrophic in some cases.
ReplyDeleteBut I also agree that we are in a very early stage of this technology, and possibilities are infinite. Augmented Reality could change the way we learn in a classroom, the way we interact with information.
If we think about it, many great developments have happened but the most of the classroom looks exactly the same as they look 100 years ago, we are still looking into a screen with plane images or videos to show as the content. just imagine a history class, where past event could be recreated in our 2018 classrooms, and instead of taking note hoping to remember the lessons we are interacting with it!
Valentina