Next Generation Goggles: Augmented Reality Meets Virtual Reality
Parvathi R
Working as a Assistant Professor in CSD department at SNS College of Engineering
Experiencing Life via Virtual Reality
VR is a completely immersive experience where you can experience a completely 3D world contained within the confines of the six inches around your eyes. Your actual physical context is made irrelevant and cannot be experienced directly.
Upsides: Complete control of the user experience. High-definition experiences. The ability to curate and customize experiences for each individual user.
Downsides: Isolation from reality. Physical movement is constrained and often dangerous.
When Augmented Reality Meets Virtual Reality
What Apple's hybrid does is to combine many of the positive features of both systems, while mitigating many of the negatives. From a user experience standpoint, when you put on Vision Pro goggles you will see a highly accurate and enhanced version of the physical space around you, but in a very clever technological twist, you are experiencing this thru the hardware of VR. The Vision Pro's cameras create a version of your physical context by utilizing:
"A pair of high-resolution cameras transmit over one billion pixels per second to the displays so you can see the world around you clearly. The system also helps deliver precise head and hand tracking and real‑time 3D mapping, all while understanding your hand gestures from a wide range of positions", explains Apple's Website.
Apple has also made a very humanizing gesture by providing an outward real-time video display of your eyes, giving those around you a sense of your existence thru "the portals to your soul".
Where this matters is that in one piece of hardware, you can craft both an AR and a VR experience. While the current focus seems to be on AR, the power of this hardware to make a significantly more enjoyable VR experience is formidable. The sophistication of voice, hand, and eye control will allow a much richer ability to navigate virtual worlds, with the ability to transition easily back into an augmented reality world. Apple's initial hybrid rollout, while a significant step forward, represents the first phase of a long series of technological advances needed to fully support the Metaverse. This is primarily due to Apple's focus on AR, by layering data and connectivity over reality. Rather than adding box screen versions of the people you are meeting with, the Metaverse will be a place where a 3D representation of your meeting colleague will appear to inhabit your space with you in a highly photorealistic way. The downside of this technology with we may have a difficult time determining the real from the virtual.
AR/VR and Architecture
There are two places worth noting, of many, where AR/VR will influence architecture, first is the potential to create "white canvas" spaces within a building that can be enhanced by AR/VR headsets. These spaces can become a common ground where users can come together physically and virtually and enjoy the same experience. These spaces will need to physically be more generic, allowing AR/VR to provide character.
Secondly, in terms of both AR and VR, architects will have the opportunity to create "experiences" in addition to normative notions of "space". This shift can have a profound effect on the practice of architecture. Currently, we program buildings to facilitate several activities, but as buildings are traditionally static, we have not generally focused on experience design, which can change within a space. AR/VR Hybrid headsets allow the character and mood of a space to change dramatically from moment to moment. Your meeting or event can appear to start in Venice and end on a mountaintop.