On April 19th, according to foreign media reports, augmented reality (AR) and virtual reality (VR) technology have the same origin, but still have different stages of development. With the actual demand and technological development, the two will merge again in the future.
We can finally say that the era of virtual reality for high-end users has arrived. The virtual reality device Oculus Rift and HTC Vive are globally launched and are beginning to give consumers the possibility to experience a whole new world. At the same time, the development of augmented reality is different, and its viable consumer-grade technology still needs further development. Of course, whether it is virtual reality or augmented reality, their technological development comes from the same starting point.
Although the origins of augmented reality and virtual reality can be traced back to the birth of modern computer technology, the first prototype similar to contemporary equipment was invented by famous computer scientist and Turing Award winner Ivan Sutherland. Head-mounted display. In 1968, Sutherland, an associate professor of electrical engineering at Harvard University, invented a head-mounted display device called "The Sword of Damocles." The entire system places the display device on the ceiling of the user's head and is connected to the headset through a connecting rod, which converts the simple wireframe to a 3D effect image.
However, Philco, a Philadelphia-based company, believes it is the inventor of the first head-mounted display. The company said that the first head-mounted display system was developed in 1961, in which the camera was placed in one room and the user was wearing a display device in another room. When the user's head is rotated, the system adjusts the position and angle of the camera accordingly. This is the first example of implementing remote monitoring.
Structurally, this head-mounted display (HMD) is now strikingly similar to the various AR and VR products available today. Compared with Sony's augmented reality device Wonderbook or Nokia's mobile application HERE City Lens, the head-mounted display at the time was not the same as the augmented reality.
Augmented reality technology has achieved success in a variety of ways. Augmented reality is the improvement and assistance of real life, which is also considered to be the direction of its development. In the 1961 US Air Force Armstrong Lab, Louis Rosenberg developed Virtual Fixtures, which function to remotely operate the machine. Rosenberg later moved to augmented reality, including how to overlay virtual images into the user's real-world picture – a hot topic in contemporary virtual reality technology. Since then, the development path of augmented reality and virtual reality has been separated.
In fact, the first successful application of this technology to live broadcast was in 1998, when Sportvision, a leading company in the field of sports graphic packaging and motion data tracking, developed the 1st & Ten system. In the live football live broadcast, for the first time realized the visualization of the "first attack" yellow line on the TV screen. The technology was developed for ice hockey, where the blue glow was used to mark the location of the puck, but the application was not accepted by the average audience.
Just a year later, the augmented reality development tool ARToolKit came out. Developed by Hirokazu Kato of Nara InsTItute of Science and Technology, this open source tool is arguably the first example of consumer-grade augmented reality. In 2005, ARToolKit was combined with the Software Development Kit (SDK) to serve early Symbian smartphones. Developers can enable ARToolKit's video tracking function through the SDK to calculate the relative orientation between the phone camera and the specific logo in the real environment. This technology is seen as a revolution in augmented reality technology, and ARToolKit still has applications in Andriod and iOS devices.
We will then turn our attention to the development path of modern virtual reality technology. Palmer Luckey, the founder of virtual reality device Oculus VR, was a young engineer at the University of Southern California who worked part-time at the mixed reality lab of market research firm CreaTIve Technologies. In the 1990s, Rachi was dissatisfied with the low-end virtual reality devices on the market and developed several prototypes of head-mounted devices. This has caused a strong focus on the video game development industry. Among them, John Carmack, the industry's leading company id Software, and Brendan Iribe, former CEO of Scaleform, are key players in the Oculus Rift to attract public attention.
With the help of a number of industry celebrities, Oculus launched a crowdfunding campaign on Rift in 2012, which eventually raised $2.43 million, which is 974% of its crowdfunding target. This allowed the Oculus Rift to transform from a prototype of a head-mounted display to a consumer-grade product. In March 2014, Facebook announced the acquisition of Oculus VR for $2 billion, which enabled the company to build a high-level software and hardware R&D team to deliver a higher level of virtual reality experience.
When Oculus VR developed virtual reality technology through the virtual reality device Rift, Google developed virtual reality in different directions. In April 2013, Google released Google Glass. This augmented reality head-mounted reality device projects the information of the smartphone to the user's eyes, and the device can also directly communicate. Of course, Google Glass is far from being a revolution in augmented reality, but it has rekindled public interest in augmented reality.
In the next few years, we will also see more and more augmented reality or virtual reality devices flooding the market. These include Google, Sony and HTC's many devices. In addition, Microsoft announced in 2015 that it has developed augmented reality glasses HoloLens to enter the field.
In the month when the Oculus Rift was delivered to end users, Microsoft HoloLens was just being delivered to developers. This also clearly shows the gap between virtual reality and augmented reality in consumer technology. Perhaps Microsoft's head-mounted display device is the starting point for the convergence of augmented reality and virtual reality. Through HoloLens, there is an opportunity to develop augmented reality technology to the current level of consumer-grade virtual implementation devices. Of course, the advent of consumer-grade augmented reality products will take years, but if augmented reality technology can reach the technical level of Rift crowdfunding four years ago, then the development of augmented reality technology will be very open. Facebook has shown a strong interest in the convergence of the two technologies, and Microsoft's HoloLens provides a starting point for such a device convergence, it is not difficult to believe that the next decade will see the popularity of related applications.
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