Augmented Reality Vs Virtual Reality

We all have dreamt of living in an adventures land. We all have some fantasy dreams like visiting the minion’s cartoon world, spending time in the frozen land with the animated characters, having a conversation with the ice-age animals, flying with Harry Potter's magic stick, exploring the pyramids or having a trip to the Jurassic world. How adventurous it would be when we visit such mysterious places. Our dream can come true now with augmented reality and virtual reality.

Both augmented reality and virtual reality are the trending technologies that can show off a virtual world around us. I have been passionate about the concepts of AR and VR, right from the day I heard about it. I and my friends have planned to develop a project implementing these topics.

Now let me explain why these concepts fascinated me more than any other trending technologies.

Virtual reality

In terms of computers, the word “virtual” can be defined as something that is absent physically, but its presence can be felt using specific software. Virtual reality can be defined as generating a virtual environment with realistic images, sounds, videos and other sensations that can simulate the user that he is present in that imaginary world. It can be achieved with VR headsets (head mounted glasses with a screen in front of our eyes).

It has its unique applications in areas like education and training, video games, entertainment, flight, and other vehicular simulators and training surgeons to operate with virtual organs.

Augmented reality

The word “augment” can be defined as making something huge in size or value. Augmented reality can be defined as a live direct or indirect view of any real-time environment by augmenting it through computer-mediated inputs.

It is used in areas like entertainment, military, marketing, etc.

Mixed reality

More or less, both augmented reality and virtual reality have similar applications with it. So to combine the power of both the technologies, we have come up with mixed reality.

The concept of mixed reality actually fuses the real world components with the virtual world that helps us to explore a high level imaginary virtual world around us.

To experience such an imaginary virtual world around us, Windows have introduced windows mixed reality headsets that can create holographic and mixed reality experience.

This video will illustrate the experience you gain wearing the windows mixed reality headset.

There are few amusement parks in Singapore and Florida that give you a 3D experience of Hollywood movies. My dream is to build such amusement parks with concepts of AR and VR in our homeland.