AR/VR Quest #1 From Jonny Quest to Harry Potter’s Wizards Unite - How Virtual Reality has Started to Own Your (normal and mostly boring) Reality
Even if you are living under a rock on the remote island of Australia, you must have heard this term called AR/VR from someone. Most of the people associate that weird-looking headgear which looks like some kind of helmet from some sci-fi short film with AR/VR, but it is more than just a random tech feature, it is a completely new way of interacting with our reality using technology.
We have been trying to augment our surrounding by digitizing the information around us. The term was coined by two Boeing engineers called Thamos Caudell and David Mizell in 1992. Multiple creators have shown us what it looks like to transfer our consciousness into a virtual world and living in it to experience something which is hardly possible to experience in the real world.
It all started on Cartoon Network with Hanna-Barbera creating, this TV series which revolved around a kid called Jonny who is the son of a scientist who had designed a device which freakishly looks similar to today’s VR gears. After wearing these devices these characters entered; what the producers called ‘Quest World’ (Their virtual reality).
Some other examples of such occurrences of VR in pop culture are the movie franchise ‘The Matrix’ and one of the most popular music videos by Duke Dumont.
The whole movie ‘The Matrix’ was established on the narrative about the existence of a virtual Utopian world which anyone could enter using the Matrix devices from a super Dystopian world where humans live underground and machines farm life energy by imprisoning humans into this Utopian virtual world. Finally, the protagonist of the film ‘Neo - The Chosen One’ starts to see/feel the presence of the Utopian Matrix in the Dystopian present after losing his eyes.
By the modern definition of Augmented Reality, our beloved Keanu Reeves discovered the AR in the world of VR. His reality started to get morphed by the presence of this under the layered presence of massive information. Yeah, that sounded like a great analogy.
But the rise of open-world and RPG games were literally the most game-changing event for VR. Rockstar Games created a whole new world of GTA for gamers to delve in for hours. Though these worlds still existed on the PC screens, the gamers definitely lived in those realities. Ubisoft’s Far Cry and Assassin's Creed created such in-depth and engaging stories for gamers to not just live in random virtual environments but also enjoy their stay.
This continued over the years until the smartphones came along, no-one was looking at AR/VR as a serious innovative tech.
Since 2009, the smartphones sales have boomed like never before. All the electronic devices before them like computers, telephones, radios, and televisions sets never experienced such a meteoric rise in consumption in the past. Smartphones did not just connect the world but also made the event dynamic. The surrounding as we see it became much more fluid and interactive with the increasing processing power of mobiles.
Top smartphone makers along with chip makers kept adding sensors, receivers and high-level electronics which allowed the mobile systems designers to create much more intricate applications for the consumers to use.
Along with hardware evolution, Google, Apple, and Facebook have created a close-knit network of these devices using apps and operating systems. These data-mining giants have created avenues for developers to build upon the great hardware which was being added to the devices by Samsung, Apple, and Qualcomm.
This gave birth to the gaming engines.
Gaming engines are the platforms which are used to make various applications which we call as Games. This attracted multiple creative folks to developer’s world. Ideally, everyone has to learn to code and manipulating source code of whatever you are creating using any computer language or gaming engine, but because of their modular nature, gaming engines made it very simple for non-computer engineers and people who “Do not code” to interact and manipulate these digital applications.
