Over the past decade or so, there has been the emergence of three worlds — the real world, the virtual world and the mixed-reality world. The real world involves people using all their senses and having a well-rounded sensory existence. The virtual/mixed world tries to get people an experience close to reality and in some cases, give them an experience beyond reality. While virtuality has reached a stage where it is able to successfully transport an individual into its own world, it has not been able to give them the exact well-rounded real world sensory experience.
The method of how the integration of the real and virtual worlds has given rise to two phenomena — virtual reality (VR) and augmented reality (AR).
So, what are VR and AR, and how does one, especially a media educator, treat the education of theseIJ The one-line answer is that VR makes the user feel like they're in a different world while AR introduces virtual content into the real world.
AR adds layers to the real world, VR blocks it out entirely. AR is designed to be used in public, VR in private. AR can be social, VR is looking to create new social interactions in virtual spaces.
AR takes digitally created content/user experience and overlays it on top of the real world (existing reality) in order to enhance the user’s reality.
VR is an artificial, digitally-generated recreation of a real life environment or situation with additional enhancements. VR’s goal is to immerse the user by stimulating senses of sight and sound and in some cases, senses of touch and smell as well. Both use similar techniques and mechanism technologies that serve sight, hearing, smell, touch to make you feel like you are in a different environment from your current reality. There are multiple techniques in use:
nBy blocking part/entire field of view of the user and filling up of that field of vision with digitally created content. Sensors detect the head and (in some cases) the pupil position, to serve the digital content with the proper perspective.
nWhere the user is experiencing and interacting with digital content being projected onto the real world and sensors make this combined real-world plus software surface interactive.
nYou look through transparent wearable optics to see the real world as you normally would but the virtual content is also rendered on the wearable optics and not on the real world, but the interactivity still exists.
nWhere the user is using his senses in their normal capacity but is experiencing an enhanced content consumption/entertainment/reality through content prepared specifically for that purpose and served in analog or digital mode.
Content Creation for AR/VR is the next step and all institutions that are engaged in the training & education of content creators need to be aware of these areas and start working with the leading industry players in these areas to explore how the teaching/education of content creators for these verticals needs to be developed.
The writer is Chaitanya Chinchlikar, VP (Business Development),
Whistling Woods International