In our third Creative Media Practice session we took a look at Augmented & Mixed Reality. Augmented reality is a technology that allows for objects to be superimposed spatially tracked within a 3D environment to give the impression that they are actually there, even in some cases interacting with objects within their aforementioned environments. Mixed reality takes the fundamentals of AR and builds on them significantly, allowing objects to interact with objects in real time such as being obstructed by real world objects, affected by ambient lighting or even being interactable by the user.
Practical Exercise.
During the session we individually built an augmented reality scene using the free software ‘BlippAR’. This app (through its integrated web portal) allows users to build a scene and then subsequently preview it in AR. For this I chose to construct a small scene showing a picture of the moon. When hovered over and detected by Blippar, the picture would transform into a scene showing an animated GIF of Neil Armstrong's first steps as well as bringing up information about the moon landing all while being tracked in 3D space
Uses in Industry
While both Augmented & Mixed Reality is a relatively new technology it is starting to have widespread adoption in many real world scenarios. One of the biggest successes of AR is through Snapchat’s Lens feature. In 2015, Snapchat released ‘lenses’ to their app, allowing users to superimpose tracked masks and objects onto themselves in either a picture or video to be shared online. Furthermore, AR has also been used for practical ongoing deployments, it has been leveraged by IKEA among other companies for users to preview furniture in their homes before making a purchase, as well as Apple through their ‘Measure’ app, to take accurate measurements of real world objects using a mobile device. Mixed Reality is still in its early phases of adoption due to its higher amount of processing power to work effectively. This however, has not stopped products from releasing utilising this technology however, Microsoft's hololens allows users to interact with a 3D tracked version of Windows through their headset.