The History of Augmented Reality

Intro to AR Series

Objective: This is to educate the reader about Augmented Reality.

The term augmented reality was first coined in 1992 by Thomas Caudell and David Mizell, two Boeing engineers working on a simple see-through headset that aided airplane engineers in complex wiring schematics.

According to their documentation, the goal of augmented reality, commonly abbreviated as AR, was to enable cost reductions and efficiency improvements in many of the human-involved operations in aircraft manufacturing.

We have been dreaming about the potential of AR for a long time, and the history of the medium stretches back before we even had a term for it.

In fact, AR shares a history with its technological cousin, virtual reality. Both virtual reality or VR and AR share a common ancestor The Sword of Damacles.

Built in 1968, the Sword of Damacles was created by a computer scientist and researcher, Ivan Sutherland. His goal was to create the ultimate display. A digital interface capable of transforming the physical world. The prototype was so heavy, it needed to be suspended from the ceiling by a mechanical arm. For all the hardware, it could only display basic wireframe rooms that were barely explorable. But it was one of humankind’s first experiments into replacing your real world with digital reality.

Since 1992, many people have sought to fulfill the vision that Sutherland wrote about over half a century ago. The ultimate display would be a room within which the computer can control the existence of matter. A chair displayed in such a room would be good enough to sit in. Handcuffs displayed in such a room would be confining, and a bullet displayed in such a room would be fatal. With appropriate programming, such a display could literally be the Wonderland into which Alice walked.

Today, we no longer need mechanical arms to suspend heavy machines from the ceiling. Headsets, exponentially more powerful than the sword of Damacles from 1968, can be worn on our faces like glasses or fit snugly inside our pockets. The hardware that you wear independently on your head like glasses, a visor, or a helmet, is referred to as a standalone headset or a head-mounted display, HMD for short.

However, most people will access AR for the first time with devices you probably use every single day, your smartphone. Let’s take a look at headset AR and mobile AR in more detail.

The AR Smart Glasses Market is Going Mainstream

These are currently the two main delivery systems for AR content. On the headset AR side, as of early 2018, the most widely used HMD is the Microsoft HoloLens. It is completely wireless and has a visor-like design. It runs on a rechargeable battery and 100 percent of its processing power is located inside its frame.

In the most basic sense, AR is created using the front and rear-facing cameras on your phone. You hold it up and your screen is able to display digital objects and information integrated within your real world. Your phone can now act as a portal to new worlds experiences and information.

On the mobile AR side again, this is how most of the world will experience augmented reality for the first time. In fact, the rapid development of smartphones has actually contributed to the growth of the VR and AR industries.

That’s because the same components that make smartphones work, gyroscopes, accelerometers, miniaturized, high-resolution displays, are also required for AR and VR headsets. | Image: GitHub Wiki

The high demand for smartphones has driven the mass production of these components throughout the past 10 years resulting in greater hardware innovations and decreases in costs.