The Extended Reality Blueprint

2Hardware

WHILE HARDWARE IS one of the most important components to any experience, it's also one of the most complex choices to make early in the process. Making the choice of what hardware to support guides the entire product journey and is more challenging to adjust later in the process if the decision is made in haste. Are you creating for one device? Do you need cross compatibility? Will your app have a complementary companion experience? In the future, there is going to be more crossover between virtual reality and augmented reality, hopefully in one shared device, which is sometimes confusingly referred to as mixed reality. We'll define them separately for now.

Augmented Reality Hardware

Augmented reality can be accessible from personal mobile devices, such as phones and tablets, as well as wearables in the form of glasses. You can still see the world around you but with a digital overlay of content onto your physical space. When accessing augmented reality from a phone or tablet, it's like looking through a window into a digital world. You can hold your phone up, scan the environment around you, and then content can be mapped to planes (such as the ground or a table), an image target (such as a menu or advertisement), or even your own face or body. A combination of camera mapping and accelerometers in mobile devices help your phone know its position so that as you move around, the content stays mapped to the physical world.

While phones and tablets are currently ...