Augmented Reality and Virtual Reality – Two Faces of A Same Coin

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Virtual Reality (VR) Industry is growing exponentially day-by-day with every Techno Company playing role in its development directly or indirectly. While some companies are manufacturing or researching with their innovation on this technology, others are trying to fund existing products and ideas to augment & boost their business operations.

With development going around almost everywhere, it’s important to notice the difference between Virtual Reality and Augmented Reality (AR):

Virtual Reality – brings real life situation or environment to virtual world making user feel as if he is in real world. This makes user engage all his senses in Virtual World, totally unaware of the real world.

Augmented Reality – combines information in Virtual World with the Real World (user’s environment) enabling user to interact with different objects from virtual world as if it has become part of Real World. Thus user can be aware of Real World with all his senses and control Virtual World.

As innovation is nature of development, the difference between the two is decreasing. More innovative products are hitting the market and its becoming difficult to actually identify whether the product is for VR or AR.

AS an example, VRtisian, a startup in virtual reality whose specialty is creating 3D and VR imagery for architectural projects released a YouTube video recently of a product that helps architects create architectural designs for buildings by interaction of 3D space around them continuously.

The video consists of an architect using Virtual Reality using Virtual Reality game developer software Unreal together with the HTC Vive Headset and couple of motion controllers to interact and apply various design concepts of the building.

The VRtisan Augmented Reality Video

The virtual reality headset from HTC together with hand-held motion controllers serves as key for using Unreal engine for the architectural designer. He is able to manipulate objects and create walls, furniture, and doors, among other houseware virtually out of empty space.

In terms of the ranking, HTC Vive and Oculus are the best available headsets in the market. Their applications are vast and growing every day.

Microsoft Holo Lens – an augmented reality device manufactured by Microsoft, has gained too much popularity eying its capability to render 3D virtual images to real world environment. It also has vast applications and still getting explored for more. It maps the environment of user such that user can interact by integrating the virtual environment to real and feel as if everything is part of his daily life.

Comparing the area of working and applications of these mixed reality devices, we will get confused whether they belong to virtual reality or augmented reality.

As we conclude, all we can say for now is that these devices work differently but give similar output. Hence the gap between augmented reality and virtual reality keeps on decreasing with more discoveries lined up for future.

About Author

An aspiring Computer Science Engineer from Bangalore. Never dying hunger for technology (technocrat) Writer, Blogger and social media specialist Well experienced with SEO & Wordpress Working on Virtual & Augmented reality content