A Brief History of Virtual Reality, in Patents
While modern day virtual reality and augmented reality use cases promise revolutionary undertakings in mobile applications, gaming, healthcare, retail, automotive, and enterprise industries, the technology has a long history that dates to the 1940s.
September 02, 2020 at 10:00 AM
9 minute read
Until recently, the idea of wearing a headset and becoming part of a virtual world seemed like something out of a science fiction movie. While modern day virtual reality and augmented reality use cases promise revolutionary undertakings in mobile applications, gaming, healthcare, retail, automotive, and enterprise industries, the technology has a long history that dates to the 1940s.
|What is Virtual Reality?
Virtual reality (VR) describes a computer-generated three-dimensional environment that users can interact with. Users are placed inside an experience, stimulating multiple senses, such as vision, hearing, and touch. Virtual reality usually relies on headsets, which take over your vision to simulate the environment, replacing the real world with a virtual one. At the outset, most VR headsets connected to the game system via a cable and implemented motion tracking sensors to track user movement, thus enabling a 360-degree world. Newer standalone VR headsets connect to smartphones, eliminating the risk of tripping over a cable, but provide a less powerful experience because they are not enabled with the same motion sensors.
On the flip side of virtual, augmented reality is a subset of virtual reality that simulates artificial objects within the real world. The Pokémon Go app is a popular example of augmented reality, where users search for Pokémon characters on a smartphone, which uses the camera to superimpose additional information on top of the user's environment. Augmented reality is much less immersive than the virtual reality experience. However, augmented reality builds an experience based on live surroundings. Augmented reality is much more popular on the mobile side than it is in other industries.
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