New technologies have completely revolutionized the way we communicate with the world around us and establish personal relationships. Concepts such as Smartphone, Tablet or mobile application, among others, were complete strangers until not long ago, and now most of us cannot imagine life without them.
In recent days the concept of augmented reality has come to the fore, and although it seems a term of rigorous actuality, the first experiences began in 1950. It is in this decade when Morton Heiling, through his writing “experience cinema” , led After the first attempts at its use, its aim was to incorporate the use of the other senses into the visualization of images. For this purpose, he built a machine called Sensorama, which consisted of a kind of closed booth, which isolated the viewer from the real world when viewing a movie.
In the late 1960s Ivan Sutherland and Bob Sproull followed the path of these investigations and devised the first head-mounted display, or Head Mounted Display (HMD) in English. Although it was a pioneering invention for its time, it had a very basic interface and the HMD was so heavy that it had to be hung from the ceiling , making it very difficult to use.
Despite these early trials, the term virtual reality did not exist as such until it was coined in the 1990s by a Boeing worker, Tom Caudel; However, and probably for many, this word was completely unknown until the birth of Pokémon Go, an application that is breaking records in countries like the US, where it has already become the most popular game. Developed by Niantic, it has already surpassed phenomena such as Candy Crush and platforms such as Netflix or Spotify.
Before the avalanche of this phenomenon, which has already managed to crowd public places with people willing to get hold of the desired Pokémon, other companies, such as Sony, were pioneers when it came to launching an augmented reality game or application. The Japanese company developed “Eye Toy” in 2003, in which the incorporation of a small video camera allowed the player to “enter” the game.
We are therefore facing a new revolution, that of virtual reality, which will surely change our way of interacting with the world in different aspects of our lives. This technology adds virtual elements to what we observe creating a mixed reality.
Despite the fact that today the word augmented reality is a reference for leisure, mainly due to the brilliant success of Pokémon Go, we cannot forget the different functions it can have in other areas such as health, tourism, education . With the help of this technology we can enrich our vision of reality by adding extra information to what our senses perceive. The limits begin to get smaller and smaller since we have a lens that allows us to see a world without sensory restrictions.
More information: masqueapple.com
