Virtual & Augmented Reality For Dummies

Chapter 11

Exploring Augmented Reality Use Cases

IN THIS CHAPTER

Reviewing existing augmented reality applications

Assessing augmented reality within industry segments

Predicting augmented reality’s industry impact

Many consumers were first introduced to augmented reality (AR) via Pokémon Go in 2016. The game provided users a rudimentary AR experience, where a Pokémon could appear to inhabit your environment via a 3D overlay of your mobile device’s video feed. AR technology has been around far longer than that, though, with many uses in industrial fields such as manufacturing and maintenance. And although consumers’ introduction to AR may have been via a game, AR has often been regarded as the technology consumers of the future will utilize to get work done, whereas its relative VR will be used mainly for entertainment.

Manufacturers such as Microsoft and Meta have thus far seemed to target their headsets more towards this idea of getting work done. The more open nature of AR seemingly lends itself better to collaborative environments where you work alongside coworkers, whereas VR experiences have been more solitary. And because of VR’s closed-off nature, implementing it in most ...