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Business News/ Mint-lounge / Features/  Welcome to the matrix
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Welcome to the matrix

Five things you should know about artificial reality, the technology that could change everything

A projection of a whale, developed by Magic Leap. Photo: Courtesy Magic LeapPremium
A projection of a whale, developed by Magic Leap. Photo: Courtesy Magic Leap

What if this paper could do more than just tell you about a restaurant, or a sari, or a place? What if it could show you? Let you sit inside the restaurant and observe the interiors, or let you see how a historic railway station was built when you pass it? That is what artificial reality (AR) offers. And it is the reason most of the big technology companies—Google, Facebook, HTC, Sony, Samsung, Intel and Microsoft, among others—are investing in it.

AR will exist in two forms: augmented, or mixed, reality, which will allow users to see the real world with artificial elements superimposed on it; and virtual reality (VR), which will put the user in a completely artificial space. Companies are still figuring out how to make the AR experience convincing, and, in addition to the big tech companies, some interesting start-ups are approaching the technology from different viewpoints. Magic Leap, for example, is a US-based start-up whose founder, Rony Abovitz, a biomedical engineer with a deep love of science fiction, believes AR will be generated as much by us as by machines.

These are five things you should know about AR.

It will trick our minds

When Abovitz says our minds will be involved in producing the effect of artificial reality, what he means is that certain visual tricks will cause our minds to exaggerate experiences. The Void, a project started by Curtis Hickman, an illusionist, James Jensen, a special effects developer for theme parks, and Ken Bretschneider, the host of a haunted house, puts viewers in a large room, which transforms into a large space when you put on your VR headset. This is achieved by a trick called redirected walking. Every time you turn physically in the Void, the VR will cheat and make it look like you have turned 10 degrees less than you actually have, so you can actually walk endlessly in squares or circles but feel like you are walking towards a place.

When you walk on to a floor that sinks just 6 inches, you see and hear yourself falling an entire floor in the VR, and your body really feels like it has fallen. By using visual and audio cheats like these, AR can trigger reactions that then actually enhance the experience, convincing us that what we are seeing in the artificial world is real.

It will replace screens

AR does not seek to simply be an additional experience for people already accustomed to their laptops and smartphones. It is aiming to be a completely disruptive technology that will make all real screens redundant. It will do this by creating virtual screens. So you will go to work, or just work from home, put on your headset and see a virtual screen in front of you. Microsoft has said that one of its ambitions for its mixed-reality headset, HoloLens, is to replace all the screens in a typical office with wearable devices. Start-ups such as Magic Leap and Meta, which has created an augmented reality visor, are already planning to abandon screens in their offices and have employees work only with AR glasses on.

It could be physically and emotionally draining

When Microsoft tested a virtual version of Minecraft, the popular game in which you can build your own world, on volunteers, they observed something odd. In the virtual version, the experience of holding a pick and chopping blocks to build structures felt so real to the volunteers that many were actually exhausted after an hour. This, with a game that people play for entire days on 2D screens.

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Published: 06 May 2016, 07:09 PM IST
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