Augmented Reality (AR) and Virtual Reality (VR) are the bridge connecting the digital world and the physical world. They help to enhance the visualization of information transmission, more than the real world. In particular, AR opens up many ways that technology can help us in everyday activities such as finding information, shopping or expressing ourselves. As for VR, it allows us to experience the feeling of going anywhere, whether that place is real or not. Unable to stop here, let’s learn more about those two technologies with Tech Town in this article.

What is Augmented Reality and Virtual Reality?

Augmented reality and virtual reality are reality technologies that can enhance or replace the real environment with a simulated one. AR enhances the user’s surroundings by adding digital elements to the live view, often by using a smartphone camera. A more “virtual” form of reality, VR is a fully immersive experience that replaces the real-life environment with a simulated one. 

In AR, a virtual environment is designed to coexist with the real environment, with the goal of providing information and additional data about the real world, making it accessible to users without having to search. sword. For example, industrial AR applications can provide instant troubleshooting information when a handheld is pointed at the faulty device. 

VR consists of a complete environmental simulation that replaces the user’s world with a completely virtual world. Because these virtual environments are 100% generated, they are often designed to be far more distant than real life. For example, VR could allow users to compete with an animated version of Mike Tyson in a virtual ring. 

While both VR and AR are designed to bring a simulated environment to the user, they are fundamentally different and involve different use cases. In addition to entertainment purposes, AR is also increasingly being used by businesses because of its ability to overlay useful additional information in the real world. 

We’ll dive into how both of these reality technologies work, with a focus on AR business cases in the following sections.

What is the difference between AR and VR?

While both technologies involve simulated reality, AR and VR are based on fundamentally different components and often serve different audiences. 

In virtual reality, users almost always wear glasses and headsets to completely replace the real world with the virtual world. The idea of ​​VR is to remove the real world as much as possible and isolate the user from it. Once inside, the VR universe can be coded to offer anything from a lightsaber battle with Darth Vader to a (currently incomplete) re-creation of the actual earth. In addition, VR has a number of business applications in product design, training, architecture, and retail, today the majority of VR applications being built around entertainment, especially games. 

Augmented reality, on the other hand, integrates the simulated world with the real world. In most apps today, the user relies on the screen of a smartphone or tablet to do this, point the phone’s camera at the point of interest, and capture – live-stream the scene on the screen. . The screen is then overlaid with useful information such as repair instructions, navigation information or diagnostic data. 

Currently, AR is being used in entertainment applications. For example, the mobile game Pokemon Go, in which the player must try to capture virtual creatures while moving in the real world.

How is augmented reality used in business?

Today, enterprise and business use cases are the dominant real-life AR applications. Some examples include:

•     Design and Build: Arguably the most popular and effective application of AR today, designers are using augmented reality to see what hypothetical products (or structures) would look like in real life. real environments and make virtual edits to existing products without touching them.
•     Maintenance and Repair: AR technology can guide technicians through the repair, upgrade, and maintenance steps of a wide range of products, from industrial equipment to entire buildings. AR allows technicians to work on equipment without having to consult printed manuals or websites, overlaying detailed – often visual – instructions on top of the machine itself.
•     Education and training: Businesses are using AR technology to provide a rich experience when training employees, allowing them to more holistically visualize new products and concepts. Schools are currently trying to adopt AR.
•     Healthcare: AR technology has made its way into the operating room, with overlays showing the vital steps of a surgery, vital patient statistics, and more.
•     Retail: From virtual makeup to virtual dressing rooms, businesses are using AR to give retail shoppers a revamped and modernized augmented reality experience when shopping.
•     Technology: Products like Splunk Augmented Reality bring AR to major service companies to improve their response to power outages and still gain full visibility into their data.
•     Marketing: AR concepts on packaging, point-of-sale materials, and even billboards give businesses a whole new – and much more dramatic – way to interact directly with customers.

Next Challenges

AR and VR are still in their infancy and they have a long time ahead of them before becoming mainstream technologies. Some of the most frequently mentioned business and technology challenges include:

Technological challenges

•     Processing capacity on mobile devices is still limited: Current mobile devices are still quite limited in processing, but connecting users to desktops or servers is impractical. The processing power of mobile devices will have to scale or work will have to be transferred to the cloud.
•     Limited mobile bandwidth: While cloud-based processing offers a potential solution to the mobile problem, mobile bandwidth is still too slow in most places to provide processing Real-time video required. This is likely to change as mobile bandwidth improves.
•     Complex development: Designing an AR or VR application is expensive and complex. Development tools will need to become more user-friendly to make these technologies accessible to developers.

Challenges in business

•     The inconvenience of VR hardware: Wearing virtual reality headsets and tight room spaces often degrades the user experience. VR input devices in the form of controllers are also often unintuitive, not comfortable to use
•     Building a business model: Beyond video games, many AR and VR applications are still in the early stages of development, their capabilities unproven in the business world.
•     Security and privacy issues: The backlash against Google Glass initially demonstrated that users remained skeptical about the rise of cameras and their privacy implications. How secure is the video feed and are copies stored somewhere?

Despite the above challenges, significant progress is underway to pave the way for the commercial and business use cases of AR and VR and make them even more mainstream.

The future of AR and VR

We can expect a bright future for AR and VR, which in the coming years will bring new capabilities and wider use. Improvements in video quality, processing power, mobile bandwidth, and AR/VR hardware will drive widespread adoption, and reduced development costs and complexity will provide more options. for creators to discover. Systems that track eye movements and facial expressions will slowly make bulky controllers obsolete. 

While gaming and entertainment will continue to drive this market, AR and VR will also see emerging reality applications. In the world of virtual reality, these include fully virtual surgery, where surgeons only perform their work in a simulated environment and have robots do the actual work. In the AR world, the ability to travel virtually anywhere is made possible by an emerging technology platform called Mirrorworld, which recreates the physical universe on a 1:1 scale. Education will likely continue to move to virtual models on AR and VR platforms both in the classroom and in the enterprise. And eventually, as retailers will continue to rely on AR apps to upgrade the virtual shopping experience, gradually, the need for physical storefronts will become obsolete. 

Hopefully the information Tech Town brings above will be useful for businesses. If your business is looking for a reputable AR VR application development company, a team of highly qualified engineers with reasonable costs, Tech Town is confident to become the right choice for your business. 

Tech Town is a technology company from Vietnam, with representative offices in the United States, Japan, Canada, the Netherlands,… We provide AR & VR application development services for businesses, optimize content delivery with immersive technologies, enhance the performance of decentralized systems, enhance customer experience, and delight next-generation users. In more than 4 years of operation, Tech Town has become a reputable technology partner trusted by startups and enterprises from many countries around the world such as the US, Canada, the Netherlands, Japan, the UK and other countries. other developers. 

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