VR and AR, why can’t we all just get along
In this blog I mostly concentrate on virtual reality. I wanted to write something about the relationship between virtual reality and augmented reality. Because there’s been a lot of talk about VR and AR in the media in the last few months. The whole narratives of the last six months or so seems to have been AR vs. VR. Is augmented reality taking over from virtual reality? Who’s going to win? Augmented or virtual reality?
To be honest I think this whole conversation is ridiculous. I think it’s putting forward a sort of a competition between these two mediums that doesn’t really exist and absolutely does not make sense.
Part of the reason I think this is because of my experience I’ve been working in VR for almost 20 years now and in that time I’ve known lots of people who worked in both virtual and augmented reality. Essentially, everywhere I’ve gone and worked where there were people working in VR, there were also people in working in AR and they’re very often the same people. Augmented and virtual reality really have developed together. Most people who work in them really see them as closely tied together technologies. The people who have developed these technologies really wouldn’t see them as competing and I wouldn’t say that one needs to win over the other.
But actually the real reason I think the idea of conflict between VR and AR ridiculous is, kind of, the opposite. I believe that virtual reality and augmented reality have grown up as closely related technologies but I’ve also said quite a lot in many different contexts that virtual reality is going from being atechnology to being a medium. From being developed by engineers solving engineering problems to being developed by artists who are t by thinking about what kind of work they can make with it.
And when I see virtual reality and augmented reality, though I see similar technologies, I see very very different media.
Virtual reality is all about full immersion. You’re blocking out the real world and entering into another world. Youre fully inside this other world and you no longer experience yourself where you are in real life. It’s all about transportation. That’s the power of VR. That’s what’s great about it. That’s what those of us who’ve tried it and love it love about it.
Augmented reality is really the opposite. It’s about being in the real world and adding digital graphical elements to it. It would be stupid to create an agumented reality experience that doesn’t make use of the fact that it happens in the real world because it would spoil the point.
And that makes the experiences you would want to make with your own VR are completely different. One is about going somewhere else and the other is very much about where you really are right now.
Those are going to be both really exciting but very different experiences. And I’ve heard some people say AR is better than VR because it’s about the real world or the opposite VR is better because it transports you somewhere. But I don’t see why we can’t have both things.
There are experiences that will transport you somewhere else and that’s fantastic. If you are experiencing walking on the moon, you don’t want to be reminded that you’re actually in your bedroom.
But there are also fantastic experiences which are very grounded in where you are and where impossible and magical things become part of your real day to day environment, that’s what Pokemon GO does this extremely well.
These are two media that allow us to do radically different things. And they’re both great and I’m sure as we go forward we will want to have both experiences, being transported to another world, and making our own world magical.
If I were to make a prediction going forwards, I would say that as they develop as media VR and AR are going to diverge. They are going to be doing very different things. The artists that make the work are going to be making very different choices about what they do in one medium or the other.
In 10 years time we’re going to look back and we’re going to think it’s ridiculous that we ever thought of VR and AR assomehow either the same medium or competing. They’re just going to be very, very different things that are going to be part of our life. They are going to be creating different experiences but those experiences will be different and they will touch different parts of our lives.
