Creating Augmented and Virtual Realities

Part VI. Use Cases in Embodied Reality

Technology is only as good as its applications. In the following chapters, we look at how immersive technology is being used in the real world.

Readers are likely familiar with “The Hype Cycle,” a hypothetical graph (see Figure VI-1) that describes the growing pains of new technologies. Since the first head-mounted display (HMD) was created in 1968, eXtended reality (XR) has seemed trapped in the trough of disillusionment. Since XR’s return to public consciousness here in the twenty-first century, we’ve seen many false starts, from Meta’s collapse to the privacy backlash against the Google Glass.

Although some might take these failures to indicate that XR is yet another overhyped technology, the applications presented in this chapter beg to differ. Slowly but surely, XR technology is finding its niche, climbing toward the plateau of productivity, application by application.

In Chapter 11, Dilan Shah, cofounder of YUR, Inc. examines how we can tailor immersive technology to people with different health conditions. The health-care industry is a space in which processes and procedures must be strictly adhered to in order to ensure optimal care. How can virtual reality (VR) be adapted to this space and what benefits can it provide? In this chapter, we provide a deep-dive practical example of how hand tracking can stabilize tremors in Parkinson’s patients in a virtual environment.

Figure VI-1. The Hype Cycle

In Chapter 12, Marc Rowley takes ...