Augmented Reality

Imagine this: You're sitting on the couch watching a movie. It's dim, but not dark. You're alone. Or so you think. You hear a noise! It sounds like it's coming from the kitchen. You walk over to the kitchen and see a giant scary alien monster drinking your milk! You make your hand into a gun shape, point at the alien, and make a "Pow!" noise with your mouth. The alien falls down dead, and disappears. You take off your AR headset, and go back to watching TV. You sitting on the couch and running around the house with your fingers pointed and making gun noises was real. The alien in your kitchen, however, was not. 

Augmented Reality is like Virtual Reality except, unlike VR where it lets you play around in a world created by someone else, it allows you to interact with things that don't exist, but are in your own world. For example, Photoshop. You know how, in Photoshop, you have layers of all the things you added to enhance a photograph? Well, AR just layers things on top of the world that already exists in real time. This allows you to interact with digital things in the real world.

Remember Pokemon Go? That is AR. You can catch Pokemon in your living room, down the street, etc. The game uses actual locations in the real world and just plants Pokemon in it. 

Pokemon Go really got the conversations about what AR can really do. While most people are still backing the VR horse, I personally see it as a stepping stone to the real prize. Augmented Reality can allow you to experience a new sense of wonder. If you are playing a video game, it's cool and all, but it's just you pressing buttons and staring at the TV. What if the video game world was your backyard and your controller was your hands?

Augmented Reality is meant to bring back everyone's social nature. It allows us to continue experiencing the world for what it is instead of giving us more excuses to stay inside and never leaving to do anything while being glued to someone else's dream. 

While writing this blog, I thought I was going to have to talk about all the possibilities of AR, but it turns out there is this tech guy named Meron Gribetz and he had a Ted Talk about the things AR can and will allow you to do. I was so stunned about what his team has already accomplished, it blew anything I thought you could do with it out of the water.