The Extended Reality — Introduction for Dummies
My first attempt to write something on my own. This is a mix of what I learned over the last few months on working with Augmented Reality projects and reading (Thanks to Medium).
The objective of the narrative is for the following reasons
- Help me discover what I know
“I write to discover what I know.”
— Flannery O’Connor
2. Help people like me (Business Analyst) learn the basics of Augmented Reality
3. Share my understanding and stand corrected (the onus is on readers to either correct my understanding or guide me to a place where I can read more on the topics that I have covered)
The Basics first — The paradigm of Realities
Let's start by understanding the difference between what each of the terms and how do they interplay between each other.
Reality: Refers to what exists in the physical world. The objects that we see with naked eyes.
Augmented Reality: This is an overlay of virtual objects over the physical world. It combines both real-world objects and virtual objects.
Mixed Reality: Extension of Augmented Reality, with only addition that the virtual objects start interacting real-world objects. Sometimes this is also referred to as Augmented virtuality.
Virtual Reality: Immersed completely into virtual world. It cuts you off from the physical world. You can sit at home and immerse yourself being in the center of Oval stadium with 25K+ spectators watching the cricket match.[This should be the dawn of Virtual Reality TV experience for all sports enthusiasts]
Do read below article from my colleague, and understand the different really terms —
Next — let's understand some of the factors that influence the business analysts while determining the requirements and delivering the recommendations
User
Like any other project, it's important who understands who the user is — persona, values and the business problem/challenges that we intend to address and goals of the user. I would also recommend to also capture the physical attributes [wearing spectacles or any other special considerations] of the user so this can be considered in designing the application — especially HMD.
Working environment
XR projects do recommend understanding the working environment of the user such as — brightness and contrast (sunlight), objects, distance, available space, type of input and output methods.
The input methods could vary anywhere between our regular mouse and joysticks to advanced tracking such as head/eyes, voice inputs & hand gestures. Similarly, output devices could be a normal screen, 3D screen or holographic emitter, projector or the actual HMD (Head Mounted Device).
It is to be noted that the intuitiveness and immersion experience of the user varies based on the input and output methods. Say, HMD device with head/eyes along with gestures provides a completely immersive experience for the user.
Field of View (FoV)
Sounds technical but important for the BA to understand the FoV of the user. The FoV implies the observable area for the user when wearing the device. [Typically measured in degrees]. Note that the FoV varies based on the output method [screen, HMD & Projectors]
The human eye has a field of view of 120 degrees and up to 20–270 degrees with eye rotation. This dramatically reduces when using the head-mounted devices, bringing this down to 40 degrees. It is to be noted that FoV varies as the user steps back or moves forward. As designers/Analysts, it’s important to understand the FoV of the device and the distance from which screen will be projected. A wider FoV is preferred for a completely immersive experience. In the upcoming posts, we will review in detail on FoV.
Occlusion
This is one of the essential cues in designing an AR environment. This happens when a 3D object incorrectly overlays on top of the real-world or another 3D object. The experience is lost when incorrect occlusion happens
Wrapping up
I hope this post gives a birds-eye view of AR and what business analysts should consider when designing applications. In the upcoming series, we will dwell and gaze more into how AR has been at the forefront of designing enterprise applications, interesting use cases and what is coming new.
See you soon! 👋
