How to integrate the real world and the virtual world

Augmented reality and mixed reality are two technologies that have been growing over the last few years. Industry verticals such as healthcare, education, manufacturing, construction to name some have been seeing an increased uptake of these technologies. Some of the augmented reality and mixed reality products that are available in the market are Microsoft Hololens 2, Nreal Light, Magic Leap One, Unreal Engine, Unity Engine, AjnaLens and Jio Glasses to name some.

A few primary use cases of augmented reality applications include game development, education, engineering industry, corporate automation and medical science. Augmented reality is used as a primary tool in education, as currently students use it to learn biology or crack some difficult mechanical engineering problems. 

In terms of the engineering industry, prominent applications like Vuforia chalk are currently being used by industry professionals to train to their employees. Augmented reality applications now serve as measurement tools for many engineers and carpenters out there, because of augmented reality’s depth sensing abilities.

In terms of navigation, it is being used for indoor navigation, which helps in guiding their customers and improves the overall crowd control efficiency in large scale malls. 

Mixed reality is currently being used by medical professionals in assessing their approach towards complex surgical operations. This helps in lowering the amount of risk and pressure associated with every operation. It also serves as an education platform for medical students to understand the depths of the human body.

Augmented reality is completely free from any kind of dependents, it adds more information to the current real world, usable anywhere anytime. Mixed reality requires an enclosed area, along with tethered headsets such as Hololens.

Fortunately for developers there is an ocean of applications or use cases for augmented reality, as a general-purpose computing device today. With mixed reality, it has the capability of switching between augmented reality and virtual reality on the same device or even enhancing the experience further by making virtual objects appear real in the daylight.

Augmented reality and mixed reality are mass consumer technologies, usually used for longer periods of time, thus it poses quite the challenge for both augmented reality and mixed reality. Augmented reality is affordable, it is accessed through asset ARcore supported phones, whereas mixed reality comes at a hefty price. Affordability helps in the ease of access to the wider community.

Vendors are continuously supporting Unity and Hololens development especially Hololens and Magic leap, which have a very prominent developer community. Nreal Light is growing as well. They back developers with documentation as well as constant one to one chat forums. Unity has an enterprise level scaled knowledge database and a very active and prominent developer community as compared to Unreal.

Key takeaways 

• Mixed reality is being used by medical professionals in assessing their approach towards complex surgical operations.

• Augmented reality is completely free from any kind of dependents, it adds more information to the current real world.

• Mixed reality requires an enclosed area, along with tethered headsets such as Hololens.