A-B-C of Augmented Reality (II): vs. Virtual Reality

First of all, sorry. We were busy these days. We'd no time to update the blog.
We've to organize us in a better way. Now, let's continue talking about AR.

Some days ago we talked about the main idea that represents the augmented reality (AR) technology.

We all have heard about virtual reality and maybe some of you can't distinguish the difference between them. Well, here comes a simple explanation.

Virtual reality (VR) is a technology based in non-real images in a computer-generated environment. VR allows us to interact in a artificial world which replace the real world where we live. The keyword is replace. While AR adds new information to the real one, VR shows the user new information over the real one.

That VR could be generated through different devices such as googles, helmets, gloves or any type of special devices that captures the position and movement of the body, while it's moving in a virtual environment. We can see it in the next video.

Using googles and thanks to sensors, the character can move and interact in this kind of VR videogame. We see there's nothing from the real world visible in the environment.

Now, we can saw a similar videogame but using AR. In this image, we can see that gloves, helmets and others sensors are necessary to obtain the AR vision, but the result is different: the user can see the real world and interact with both the virtual and real images.

These images are from the ARQuake project, an AR project from the School of Computer and Information Science of the University of South Australia.

We'll talk about this special project in a few days. Since that, have fun and learn, learn!

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