Extended reality places the digital world onto the physical world. Augmented reality is the oldest and is the basic form of extended reality, where we place part of the digital world onto the physical world. Virtual reality is the highest form of overlapping digital world to the physical world, because it nearly replaces all of the physical world with the digital world.
There are many use cases of integrating the digital world because there are many resources that can be pulled from databases. From entertainment to manufacturing and from education to healthcare, you can pull digital resources and lay it onto the physical world to make our daily lives easier. Imagine, having a 3D image or additional detail pulled from the database while doing a surgery, with just a simple phone or AR glasses. AR has evolved throughout the years and now they even have the option of letting oneself become an AR object and send a presentation of themselves as a hologram through beem technology.
AR is still getting developed along with VR, meaning hardware that supports it will evolve as well. When you develop AR, you must take hardware into consideration. Think about how your software reacts to different mobile devices with different screen ratios and different camera quality. For example, certain cameras may not have good lighting and field of view. Let’s talk simply on how it works. A tracker should be able to absorb the physical world to properly lay out the digital world real time. By having technology like simultaneous localization and mapping, gps tracking, object and camera tracking, the tracker should be able to properly lay out the digital world. If your phone doesn’t have a gyro for example, it is unable to measure 3 degrees of freedom, meaning AR experience will be minimal.
Good practices are to ensure you know the hardware and its limits, so that you are able to capture quality data and create the software that has minimal impacts to user experience. It is recommended to test your AR products on different platforms.
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