Augmented Reality is the answer to Virtual Reality’s fatal flaw
I’ve spoken a lot recently about the advent of virtual reality and made various proclamations about the huge impact it will have. I like virtual reality, and I want to see the medium flourish. Despite my optimism I am aware that there are a number of issues inherent in VR which may hold it back from widespread adoption. The experience of VR may be too immersive to be practical for most day-to-day applications. A solution to the shortcomings of Virtual Reality can be found in its cousin, Augmented Reality. Often grouped together and referred to in tandem, these technologies appear very similar on the surface. The truth is that these are two vastly different mediums. The application of Augmented Reality is diametrically opposed to the application of Virtual Reality, and AR may prove to be the medium which really revolutionises our digital interfaces.
The argument against Virtual Reality
Virtual Reality is going to change the way we consume content because it promises complete immersion. A story, a photograph or a film is a depiction of an experience; Virtual Reality places us within the experience, making us a part of it. It’s easy to see how this technology will become a new medium for entertainment, and has obvious applications in filmmaking and electronic gaming. We may soon see VR branch out of the living room and into the office as well. Already BMW is using VR as part of their design workflow, and Sydney company Ineni Realtime uses virtual reality to simulate and visualise massive construction projects before a single brick has been laid.
VR is so powerful as an entertainment or prototyping tool because it allows us to fabricate a completely new reality separate from our own. The argument could be made, however, that this separation from reality is too absolute to be practical. Total immersion in a virtual world requires total disengagement from the outside world. Even if you are watching a 360° video or playing a virtual reality video game from the comfort of your own living room, being completely immersed in the experience can lead to feelings of vulnerability as you’re unable to see or hear anything happening in the real world around you. Many users of VR also report feelings of motion sickness or headaches after wearing a headset for extended periods of time because the immersive nature of VR confuses the brain. It’s unclear whether these issues can be alleviated by better design and continued exposure. At the moment there are a number of negative experiences associated with the medium which must be overcome for VR to see mainstream adoption.
VR can also be a strangely antisocial experience. Traditional films and games are often enjoyed in a living room amongst friends. Social VR games do exist and future innovations will make interacting in virtual reality feel more natural, but actually being in the same room as someone else while experiencing virtual reality is currently not as natural as with traditional mediums. This fact also hampers the practical application of VR in traditional office environments, where effortless collaboration is essential.
Another barrier to the productive use of virtual reality is that it limits our ability to multitask. It’s useful that we are able to glance at our phone while we’re waiting for a game to load, or do work on our laptop while we’re watching a movie. The fact that these mediums aren’t completely immersive is a good thing, because most of the time we want to remain connected to the outside world. By its very nature VR is at its most successful when it has completely removed us from the outside world, and this may prove to be its ultimate flaw. Such a disconnect from reality is simply not practical or desirable for most applications of VR — even entertainment. Virtual Reality developers must find a way to overcome this issue if the medium is to see mainstream success.
The potential of Augmented Reality
The counterpoint to Virtual Reality is its cousin, Augmented Reality (sometimes referred to as Mixed Reality). These mediums are often referred to almost interchangeably, and on the surface this is understandable — they both render virtual objects in a 360° space and place the viewer within it, and they are both used in similar applications. Beneath these superficial similarities, however, are two fundamentally different mediums.
Virtual Reality completely removes the viewer from the real world and transports them to a simulated reality. They interact with this virtual world and any unintended interaction with the real world breaks the immersion. Augmented Reality, on the other hand, enhances the way the viewer experiences the physical world. The viewer is actually encouraged to interact with the real world because these interactions become richer. A regular desk becomes a three-dimensional digital interface, an empty room becomes an interactive prototype, and the park at the end of your street is now full of Pokémon. The Pokémon Go phenomenon is a timely example of how AR encourages people to interact with the real world in ways they would not have otherwise. It’s a running joke among players that walking around searching for Pokémon is actually making them fit! This stands in stark contrast to the isolation and disconnection of VR.
Most productive tasks which VR makes easier can also be accomplished in AR. The difference is that while VR simulates an entirely new reality to do this, AR enhances the way we perceive and interact with the physical world so that we do not have to be removed from reality. This eliminates the drawbacks of VR, but the true potential of AR goes even further. An AR headset is a mobile computer and with it we can simulate a graphical interface anywhere in the physical world. In the future AR may remove the need for individual devices such as computers, laptops and mobiles, as all of these could essentially be simulated and made redundant through Augmented Reality. I’ve written before how the rise of the Internet of Things is creating the need for a unified interface through which we can interact with our disparate connected devices. A combination of a conversational interface and an Augmented Reality graphical interface could be the solution to this problem.
Virtual Reality technology has seen a lot of progress in recent years and still has many practical applications. There are scenarios, however, where full immersion in a virtual world is counter-productive and this is where the difference between VR and AR can be most clearly seen. Augmented Reality is a much greater technological challenge than Virtual Reality, and this is why we have seen more progress recently in the latter. Google Glass failed to bring Augmented Reality to the mainstream, but advances in technology and popular exposure to Virtual Reality are paving the way for devices like the Microsoft HoloLens and the Magic Leap to succeed where the Glass did not.
Augmented Reality is starting to blur the boundary between our computers and the world around us. The potential of AR is that it become as ubiquitous and essential to our daily lives as the smartphone is today. It marks the next step in the evolution of the graphical interface, turning everything our eyes see into a screen.
