RP146 A Mixed New World

RP146 A Mixed New World

It's morning in the not-too-distant future. You wake up. You shoot some virtual aliens in your kitchen while eating breakfast. Later, you take your virtual pet dinosaur out for a walk in the park. And when you get home, you realize you don't like the way you' ve decorated your apartment. easily fixed. With a few waves of your hand, your home now resembles a grand European palace. That's better. Welcome to the exciting world of mixed reality.

Defining exactly what mixed reality (MR) is can be tricky. Is it the same as virtual reality (VR)? What about "augmented reality"(AR)? How is MR different from that?

Basically, VR shuts out the real world and wraps the user completely in a virtual one. AR, on the other hand, takes the user's view of the real world and adds digital information to it. (An example of AR is the game Pokémon Go. You can see the creatures against a real-world background, but they can't interact with it.) MR is somewhere in between. As in AR, digital images are placed over the real world. But in MR, these images can interact with that world as if they themselves were real. Imagine that the Pokémon you were hunting could hide behind cars or climb up trees.

To make this possible, the real-world environment first has to be mapped using 3D cameras. This allows the virtual images to "know" where they are in it. The user, wearing a headset, can then see the two worlds— real and virtual— as one.

MR is set to become the technology of the near future. And the possible applications are truly vast. Everything from gaming to communications to medicine will be changed by MR. So get ready. Reality as we know it is about to get a full virtual makeover!