Virtual & Augmented Reality For Dummies

Paul Mealy

• Publisher: For Dummies
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781119481522
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Informatik
• Subtopic: Virtuelle Realität

An easy-to-understand primer on Virtual Reality and Augmented Reality

Virtual Reality (VR) and Augmented Reality (AR) are driving the next technological revolution. If you want to get in on the action, this book helps you understand what these technologies are, their history, how they're being used, and how they'll affect consumers both personally and professionally in the very near future.

With VR and AR poised to become mainstream within the next few years, an accessible book to bring users up to speed on the subject is sorely needed—and that's where this handy reference comes in!Rather than focusing on a specific piece of hardware (HTC Vive, Oculus Rift, iOS ARKit) or software (Unity, Unreal Engine), Virtual & Augmented Reality For Dummies offers a broad look at both VR and AR, giving you a bird's eye view of what you can expect as they continue to take the world by storm.

* Keeps you up-to-date on the pulse of this fast-changing technology

* Explores the many ways AR/VR are being used in fields such as healthcare, education, and entertainment

* Includes interviews with designers, developers, and technologists currently working in the fields of VR and AR

Perfect for both potential content creators and content consumers, this book will change the way you approach and contribute to these emerging technologies.

Part 1

Getting Started with Virtual and Augmented Reality

IN THIS PART …

Understand the various terms, types, and histories of virtual and augmented reality.

Explore the current state of virtual and augmented reality’s form factors and features.

Review virtual and augmented reality’s adoption rates.

Chapter 1

Defining Virtual and Augmented Reality

IN THIS CHAPTER

Understanding what virtual and augmented reality are

Explaining some other related terms

Reviewing the history of virtual and augmented reality

Understanding the technology hype cycle and the fourth wave

When you picture “technology of the future,” what are the first things that come to mind? In ten years, how will technology be affecting your life differently than it does today?

Some people may picture self-driving electric cars that at a word automatically whisk them off to their desired destinations. Others no doubt envision an artificial intelligence (AI) utopia in which robots perform the menial labor tasks humans have had to do in the past, freeing people up to tackle life’s tougher problems.

Finally, many people may foresee a future where they’re able to create their own realities. They could be sitting on a couch at home but put on a headset and feel as if they’re at a soccer stadium thousands of miles away. They could put on a pair of high-tech glasses and have a fully realized holographic avatar of a friend appear to chat with them. They may even picture an entire room they could step into and dial up an environmental simulation as if they were actually there.

The average person may not have had a chance to experience this just yet, but nearly everyone can envision virtual reality (VR) and augmented reality (AR) as part of humanity’s future. And with good reason. For years, entertainment such as movies, TV shows, and books have been selling us on the promise of VR — the VR OASIS of Ready Player One, the VR real-world simulations of The Matrix, the full-blown environmental re-creation of the holodeck from Star Trek… . All types of entertainment have their take on what has, up until very recently, been the stuff of magic and imagination.

The ideas of VR and AR themselves seem outlandish. Within the comforts of my own home, I can put on a headset and be anywhere? Experience anything? Be anyone? Attend live concerts or sporting events as if I were there? Fly across the sea and explore other countries? Travel through entire solar systems in minutes, jumping from planet to planet? These are the kinds of VR and AR that the public has long been promised. But until recently, that promise has fallen short of, well, reality.

Within the past few years, however, computing and manufacturing technologies have begun to catch up with the promises of VR and AR. What was once the purview of science-fiction has been brought to life. Science-fiction writer Arthur C. Clarke once claimed, regarding the wonders of new technology, “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” If you were to travel back in time and show an iPhone to a medieval peasant, he would think you were a wizard with a magical picture box. And today, many first-time users of high-end consumer VR headsets often describe the experience as nothing less than “magical.”

Within the next decade, we can expect massive changes in how we work, how we’re entertained, and how we communicate, all due to VR and AR. These technologies will fundamentally change where we’re headed as a society. But in order to do so, they need creators — dreamers, innovators, and magic makers — to help them reach their potential.

Before you dive into all the details of VR and AR, you need a basic overview of these technologies. This chapter helps you recognize the different types of VR and AR and provides you with some basic vocabulary for differentiating and discussing them. This chapter also provides a brief historical overview, so you can understand how we arrived at this current place in technological history. Finally, it explains the Gartner Hype Cycle, a way of understanding how technological innovations tend to grow and change, and how the Gartner Hype Cycle applies to emerging technologies such as VR and AR.

Introducing Virtual Reality and Augmented Reality

Virtual reality is often used as an umbrella term for all manner of immersive experiences, including many related terms such as augmented reality, mixed reality, and extended reality. In this book, however, when I refer to virtual reality, I generally mean an immersive computer-simulated reality that creates a physical environment that does not exist. VR environments are typically closed off from the physical world in the sense that the environments they creates are wholly new. Although the digital environments could be based on real places (such as the top of Mount Everest) or imagined ones (such as the underwater city of Atlantis), they exist apart from the current physical reality.

Figure 1-1 shows an example of a VR environment. It’s a screen shot of Wevr’s VR experience, The Blu, which allows users to explore undersea coral reefs and ocean depths, including an encounter with an 80-foot whale.

FIGURE 1-1: A VR screen shot of The Blu by Wevr.

Augmented reality is a way of viewing the real world (either directly or via a device such as a camera creating a visual of the real world) and “augmenting” that real-world visual with computer-generated input such as still graphics, audio, or videos. AR is different from VR in that AR augments (adds to) a real-world or existing scene instead of creating something new from scratch.

By strict definition, in AR, the computer-generated content is an overlay on top of the real-world content. The two environments have no way of communicating with or responding to one another. However, AR’s definition has been somewhat co-opted in recent years to also include a more blended hybrid called mixed reality, in which interaction can occur between the real world and digitally augmented content.

In this book, when I refer to augmented reality, I use it as a blanket term that includes mixed reality as well. The two terms are often used synonymously within the industry as well, with mixed reality rapidly gaining favor as the more descriptive term for the combination of analog and digital realities.

Figure 1-2 shows an example of one of the most popular recent examples of AR, Pokémon Go, which places a digital Pokémon character within your real-world environment.

FIGURE 1-2: AR Pokémon Go being played on an iPhone.

THE THIN YELLOW LINE

For the past 20 years, millions of people have been exposed to a flavor of AR every Saturday and Sunday, although they may not realize it. In 1998, the 1st & Ten line was introduced by a company called Sportvision to digitally visualize the first-down line for the casual football fan.

In order to achieve this effect, Sportvision creates a virtual 3D model of the football field. While capturing video of the game, each real-world camera also transmits its location, tilt, pan, and zoom values to powerful networked computers. Using these values, the computers can determine exactly where each camera sits within the virtual 3D model of the field and can use a specialized graphics program to draw the line on top of the video feed.

Drawing that line is more complicated than you may think. If the line were simply overlaid on top of the video feed, any time a player, referee, or ball passed over where the line was overlaid, the person or object would appear “under” the digital representation of the line. This would lead to a very poor viewing experience.

In order to make the digital line appear to display under various people and objects, the software uses one color palette for colors that should appear as part of the field and another color palette for colors that should appear on top of the line. When it draws the digital line onto the video feed, the field color palette colors are converted to yellow where the line should appear, whereas colors in the other color palette are not converted, leading the people and objects to appear on top of the digital line.

This encompasses AR in a nutshell — a real environment (the football field) h...