One of the most famous examples of AR in the consumer market remains the Pokémon Go phenomenon, which made hunting and capturing the little creatures in your garden, train station, or park possible. However, defending and attacking « arenas » that would belong to one team or the other was an option too. This game requires the use of a Smartphone as a device. AR has been around for around as long as Virtual Reality, but apart from the famous Pokemon, little has reached the consumer market, nor actually the enterprise segment.
That being said, with the marketing buzz created by the Apple Vision Pro, and the convergence of 3D scanning techniques powered by AI, and the resurgence of the not-so-dead metaverse, interest is rising again for this technique. Consequently, some devices were created specifically for AR programs:
The first example is the pair of AR glasses, which have not evolved much across the past 6 years. Exhuming our EPSON Moverio BT350 from our cupboard where they were resting since 2019, it is quite notable that they’re still up to date. Although EPSON is now releasing new models, the previous one does not seem obsolete yet.
Keeping aside the specialized market of B2B application, resorting to devices such as the VUZIX has one interesting use case, which is the remote support. This support allows an expert to assist a technician wearing the glasses by marking in the real environment the actions to be performed. Focusing on a broader segment of consumers, it is striking to realize that AR has been reduced to a fraction of what it can deliver. AR glasses are purely used as displays, for instance connecting to a phone or a tablet to grant you the experience of a portable giant LED screen regardless of your location.
Other famous devices used these days include the Meta-powered Raybans and the Xreal Air. After having tested the latest ones at CES in Las Vegas , it is noteworthy that the resolution and field of view actually allow to work on office applications, editing, etc from your laptop with up to 3 virtual screens, while wearing only 200 g heavy glasses. The prices of the Raybans and the Xreal are at an affordable price point. Launching an affordable and usable device is a good start to gaining the acceptance of a broader audience. Using it daily reduces eye strain and allows for better visibility on the PC. It’s still not « AR » though, more of a clever way to keep a giant screen in your pocket.
On the other hand, it is disappointing that the computer version can’t be used, for instance to recognize a shape, a painting, an object, and superimpose a 3D hologram to enrich the experience in a museum for example. The Raybans do have a camera but no image recognition, as they are merely used to capture content. Due to this disadvantage, you still must resort to vastly more expensive devices such as Microsoft’s Hololens, although the field of view isn’t the greatest.
Other examples of specialized devices could promisingly emerge soon, as announced by the people from Aegis Rider show. A great idea to help navigation and even project added information on a racetrack, mixed with telemetry data projected in the helmet.
One very interesting track to follow is the convergence of Virtual Reality (VR) and AR into what is sometimes called Mixed Reality (MR), where a VR headset can display the actual environment through its cameras (a Passthrough) and still add 3D and 2D objects to the environment. The key to success and creating interesting experiences is what is called spatial anchors (the capacity to locate and display the objects at a fixed place in space regardless of your angle). You can for instance place your VR game trophy (virtual) on your (real) shelves, and interact with it, change its color etc.
The VR community has been flooded with videos from the Apple fan club and the Vision Pro, but much cheaper headsets such as the Meta Quest3 and the Pico 4 can produce similar applications since months already.
As a final tip: the domain is bubbling, the technology’s pace is astounding – watch out for this space!
BY Egli HAXHIRAJ, Anamaria MESHKURTI, Noor ALI and Franck MILET.
© All Rights Reserved Moneys Media Ltd Geneva, Switzerland.
