VR vs. AR

News & General Discussion
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VR vs. AR

on another thread we had a misunderstanding about VR(virtual reality) and AR(augmented reality). So to not derail the other thread I thought to create a new one here. To clarify the topic and get other opinions.

What is the difference between the two?
which one will hold more sway over the coarse of technology?

As a gamer, I’m defining VR as what Oculus Rift has to offer. and AR as what Microsoft Hololens has to offer.

I will have to agree with some of what @Dennis_eA has said. VR is old technology and is just being rehashed much like 3D movies. and will probably pass like a fad.

AR on the other hand while it is old technology, New stations have been using it for a long time. ( https://vimeo.com//65226685 ) I find more appealing. I don’t need to be taken inside the game, a good game design will do that already, and cause me to forget my surroundings. Instead what I want is to bring the game out of the computer into my world.

I feel that the Hololens (AR) is the future of apps, however right now the Hololens is $3,000 for developers to purchase and may be a long way out before it can hit a main stream market. after reading about the Google Project Tango I’m wondering if something like this can be accomplished now, using the phones and tablets we already own. buy using the laser focus on the built in cameras? I’m not talking about having a full 3D Minecraft world build on your coffee table. I thinking something a little mores simple like hiding a Where’s_Waldo.jpg in you living room and you have to use your device to find it.
OR
while your sitting on the couch an army of Goombas come marching out from around the side of your TV or out from the doorway to the kitchen toward you. You have to line up the cross hairs and tap the screen to shoot fireballs at them.

I would prefer if the next generation doesn’t spend its time with an Oculus and ear buds plugged in. separating them even further from reality. but what if they could take their games with them outside. and fight evil alongside Tuxedo Mask. … a call back to when I was a kid. I ran around outside with a Popsicle stick taped to my forehead and pretended to be a Sailor Scout.

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Virtual reality is about replicating a complete environment whereas augmented reality is about enhancing the real world.

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Project Tango uses special depth sensing cameras which current phones and tablets do not have.

You may be interested in Vuforia though, an AR solution that does use the device’s camera.

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Oh yeh the project tango is fantastic, its got preat potential for both VR and AR. I’ve got one, Ive been doing some room scans for game levels

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This. Like everything else it’s a spectrum. But VR basically refers to creating a virtual environment. AR refers to modifying the real environment. There are also games that mix both.

As too the future? Both technologies are still mostly gimmicks. It’s still a decade or so before they get out of the techie/enthusiast space and into mainstream.

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You seem to believe these two cannot coexist yet the only real difference between VR and AR is that one of them possesses a way to receive external data for processing. There’s no reason why you couldn’t have a headset that accomplishes both. There isn’t even a reason why you couldn’t make it very compact as technology improves.

Just check these out if you want examples of what the devices may eventually look like.

http://www.amazon.com/Excelvan-Virtual-Widescreen-Glasses-Personal/dp/B01AJUZM4E/
http://www.amazon.com/Myvu-Personal-Media-Viewer-MA-0495/dp/B000W9OJVA/

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A mobile AR technology will probably be the future for serious tech and VR will be the future for entertainment. One way or another, having an interface pop up out of something is the future. I just hope it comes in the form of AR instead of smart surfaces :face_with_spiral_eyes:

Some people really want that (a day of glass, by corning) , but it’s way more expensive and offers less functionality.

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A lot of people expect AR to be a much, much bigger market than VR. (Here’s one example.) As AR becomes widely adopted for serious tech, it’ll inevitably attract lots of games, too.

If you’re not ready to shell out for a Hololens, the Meta 2 dev kit is $950. I’ve heard the Meta folks plan to ditch all of their monitors this year and work solely on virtual monitors projected through their headsets.

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I dunno. AR is just VR with a semi transparent set of glasses. All it takes to convert AR to VR is a blackout cloth.

Tech wise I reckon they will rise or fall together. And I think the devices that become household items will do both.

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For games, I think I’m going to prefer VR. I want to be immersed in a world for a while, not splitting my attention with real world stuff.

One of the things that really sold me on the idea of AR, however, was part of a HoloLens presentation where someone was working on a piece of hardware in the real world. An expert was helping him remotely as a hologram, pointing out what to do. Kind of like this but cooler:

Just put a beer in the guy’s hand and a game on a TV in the background, and this picture alone would sell a million AR units to lazy guys.

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As far as game design is concerned, I feel like, that while VR has a ton of money and manpower being flooded into it, in the short term, AR is probably a more interesting path to explore while VR still has the kinks getting ironed out (I foresee that lasting a while, by the way - I’m a VR skeptic.)

AR has some seriously good things going for it - first, AR enhances the real world. You would be more likely to have a better experience by enhancing reality with fantasy elements, than by trying to create a fantasy world that has, at best, a crude approximation of reality. The AR path will, naturally*, be more immersive and realistic than the VR approach.
Additionally, AR can utilize our ‘natural’ interface and reduce the number of artificial controls that we use to interact with a work’s mechanics. This does not mean an AR game has no artificial controls as part of the interface…just that AR has an advantage in immersion and cost of development in that it actually saves us some work.

Speaking of costs, there’s the economy of the thing - AR adds new things to reality via the virtual interface, while VR has to replicate both virtual and real elements virtually. This means that VR has a significantly higher cost of development in time for a single work, than a comparable AR work does.

This isn’t to say AR has no downsides compared to VR - VR will always be a more customized experience, due to being a pure virtual experience. AR is reliant on the real world, which is constantly changing. Some game systems simply won’t work well with AR, though the same can be said of VR.

This is to say that the current fervor over VR may be a bit on the reckless side; I don’t think AR gaming has been sufficiently explored for us to get all hot and feverish over that sexy, sexy VR that only costs $1000-$2000 to get started with, and significantly more to write for.

We might want to have a game design contest where we all write an AR game, just to be novel. It might give us new insights on how games work. Similarly, we should also all take a stab at writing a VR game, for having first-hand knowledge of the benefits and pitfalls of writing for VR. I believe both technologies have their place.

*: Pun was totally worth it.

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This is a pretty good recent panel discussion of VR, and one of the last topics of discussion is VR vs AR. Worth watching.

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AR must appear to interact with the environment in order to be perceived as “augmentation” rather than just simple addition. Even if you blinded a subject to external light, the images produced by the hardware are still placed “in” the world around the user (unless you also covered cameras, after which it wouldn’t function at all). Hololens does this by utilizing world anchors for holograms, Nintendo’s 3DS did it by detecting a single surface in a camera feed by looking for a special card and orienting the game space around this surface. 3DS also shows that augmented reality doesn’t need to be seen through a visor.

It’s worth noting that Hololens’ body-locking feature cannot be considered by the above definition as augmented reality, since it only reacts to user movement. It’s also worth noting that Microsoft refers to the experience given by Hololens as “mixed reality”.

That said, most definitions of AR that I’ve found only require that a device provides digital projection over a real or representative image of the environment. I don’t think this definition is specific enough, but it will probably stick anyway; it’s going to be ‘robot’ and ‘drone’ all over again.

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hey bingobob. in the thread you are referring too, I just realized I … got confused, VR vs. AR :slight_smile:

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