The differences between AR & VR / Disney says no to VR in parks / Facebook could be working on AR — Inside VR & AR

Walt Disney Co. CEO Bob Iger has no interest in using VR headsets at the company’s theme parks. This is a response to rival theme parks, like Six Flags and SeaWorld, integrating VR headsets to rides. Instead, Iger is open to using AR technology on rides and attractions. Disney's CEO also said that he makes a weekly trip to the company’s engineering lab, where he wears a head-worn device that enables him to hold a light saber and duel with a storm trooper. This could be a reference to Disney’s partnership with VR startup Magic Leap. — LAT

Facebook could be working on an AR product. The social media giant assembled a roster of tech veterans last year to lead its hardware group, Building 8. Business Insider has learned that the team has been working on augmented reality, cameras and brain scanning technology. Although Facebook has no experience in selling hardware, the moves indicate they may be ready to take on the new and ambitious effort.— BI 

HTC confirmed the Vive Tracker will need a headset to run. Many had speculated they could use the Tracker to create a low-priced motion capture system. Some developers had the idea of hooking up the Tracker to the two Vive base stations to follow an object without having to buy a headset. HTC Vive Trackers will be on sale later this year. — UPLOADVR

According to research from Frank N. Magid Associates, 89% of VR headset buyers said they were “satisfied” or “very satisfied” with the product. When asked about their willingness to recommend a VR product to family and friends, 81% said they would. 90% of buyers found their device easy or very easy to use and 85% believed their headset purchase was a good value. In terms of the content being viewed on the headset, 72% said they watch non-gaming content on their headset, which outpaced 63% of users who play games on their headset. — DEALERSCOPE

Gorillaz have released a VR music video in anticipation of their new album, Humanz. Directed by Jamie Hewlett, “Saturnz Barz,” is a six-minute VR short film that follows the British virtual band on a journey through space. Viewers can also hear snippets of yet-to-be-released tracks from the album, set to release April 28. The video can be viewed through YouTube’s VR app. — UPLOADVR

SATURDAY READ: Augmented Reality and Virtual Reality: Getting Clarity on the Differences and Why Doing so Matters

Christine Perey has focused over 11 years on the topic of augmented reality. She is the founder and board member of the AR for Enterprise Alliance. Today, Perey clarifies the differences between VR & AR. This post was previously shared on LinkedIn. 

Augmented Reality and Virtual Reality both have the word “reality” in them but they’re different. As clearly shown in the 1994 Reality Virtuality Continuum figure published in the seminal paper by Paul Milgram, Haruo Takemura, Akira Utsumi and Fumio Kishino, the two “realities” differ with respect to one another and the physical and virtual worlds.

That’s why the Consumer Technology Association (CTA) created two CES exhibition floor zones: the Virtual Reality marketplace and the Augmented Reality marketplace. The VR marketplace had over 30 companies. Dominated by the black, cubular Oculus booth, it was hard to miss.

In the AR marketplace there were approximately a dozen “true” AR providers and an assortment of booths that were actually showing VR but for which there was no room in the VR zone. As I wrote in my post on the AREA blog, ODG’s booth was the largest in the AR zone. It featured hardware for experiencing content, was also black and there was also a line waiting to access the restricted area when I arrived on the first day, but that’s where the similarities ended.

Despite there being numerous differences between AR and VR, many people continue to confuse the two and many who know better persist in their efforts to blur the lines. I’m respectfully requesting that we all try a little harder to make differences clear and to capitalize on those. This will help us when we are communicating with our colleagues and asking for resources to invest in our projects.

Confusion is Not Helpful

The total ODG booth size in the AR Marketplace was 20% of the Oculus booth. I suspect that the price tags were also lower and the content was very different. Certainly the target audiences were the clearest difference: ODG wanted to appeal to enterprises while Oculus was appealing to consumers and those who will develop immersive VR content for consumers. Did anyone looking for games go into the ODG booth and wonder what they were going to shoot?

Confusion reduces a person’s ability to set priorities and make sound choices. Let’s begin by clearing up the many differences between AR and VR.

It would be a sign of our industries maturing. Other industries developed and use specialized terminology without confusion. In the construction trades, for example, everyone knows that there are similarities in the process for designing a humble home and a skyscraper but we don’t say things like “homes and skyscrapers have windows so they are interchangeable.” Closer to home, in technology, we know that there’s the Internet but we specifically know that there are Internet services that are different from the Web. The Web USES the Internet to quickly deliver information we can use to our screens.

It's been claimed, but I don’t have any proof of this, that in many companies those who are responsible for purchasing AR are also responsible for purchasing VR technologies. Does having the same decision maker mean that the decision maker doesn’t know the difference between the two?

I believe that the vendors who sell and the criteria for buying VR walls and rooms (CAVEs) are completely different than those for head worn displays. Many of the walls and CAVEs are languishing without use but that’s not the issue. Are those who recommended their purchase still employed by their companies?

Look for the Needs a Technology Can Address

In my opinion, and I believe this is supported by many others, the most successful strategy for introducing any new technology is to understand the problems or needs it address. Then, focus on the part of the business that’s expressing this (or these) needs. In enterprise, Virtual Reality has a lot of value during the design of complex products. In contrast, I’m hearing more about enterprise AR champions who are in “straight” IT innovation organizations. They are responding to requests from product line groups across different organizations to introduce AR for productivity. In other words, it's not the design group. It's those responsible for increasing efficiency and reducing downtime, errors and risk who are looking to introduce and adopt AR. 

The “Same Underlying Technology” Argument Doesn’t Hold Water

Then there’s the argument that AR and VR can be lumped together because they share many underlying technologies. This is like the window argument I gave above. Semiconductor companies like NVIDIA, Intel and Qualcomm develop chipsets and software to accelerate processes such as 3D rendering. Great! We need to see the performance of these improve. Meanwhile, Intel is the only of the three that, to my knowledge, is focusing more effort on the important processes of producing Augmented Reality experiences: capturing and recognizing/tracking/understanding the user’s context in the REAL WORLD. 

Real world detection/recognition/tracking algorithms are simply not used in VR. Does that mean that the development of deep learning (which NVIDIA does in spades) and a lot of 3D sensing (used in VR but not for the same purpose or to the same extent) needs to wait? I hope not.

There are other AR hardware requirements that are important for AR but do not matter (as much) to VR: mobility, streaming the real world to a server, selective removal of real world features, occlusion detection and compensation, etc. 

They Report to the Same Boss

It’s recently been pointed out to me that some companies that provide technologies have both VR and AR divisions and these report to the same person. For example, I’m told but I have no proof that the team working on Project Tango (a device designed with 3D AR as one of its primary uses) at Google reports to the new head of VR at Google. 

Ultimately, all groups in a company need to report to the chief executive. Below the boss, organizational structures change all the time. In my experience, organizational hierarchies change in response to the qualities or qualifications of an individual, not only to their titles.

Further, this is an argument in support of there being better distinctions between AR and VR. If the two report to the same executive they will need more clarity in how they communicate with their colleagues and lobby for limited resources to invest in their projects.

Enterprise and Consumer Audiences

Here’s where the biggest difference lies. Augmented Reality is being adopted by enterprises as a tool to improve workplace performance. Accelerating this trend is the key objective of the AR for Enterprise Alliance. Everything this organization does focuses on using AR to address enterprise needs.

In contrast, makers of VR devices and content are getting a lot of attention and, when the cost of their devices declines, may be embraced by hundreds of thousands, if not millions of consumers. At least that’s what one might conclude based on the diversity of VR companies that demonstrated at CES and size of investments being made into the technology.

This difference in the audiences is why getting our terms separated and messages clear matters. A teenager who wants to practice target shooting in cyberspace should be able to purchase a head-mounted VR display and keep the guns out of the real world. A field service professional that’s trying to get home in time for dinner and to help with his teenager’s homework assignment, needs to be able to perform repairs more quickly and, using Augmented Reality, there’s a greater likelihood that the task will be done with fewer or no errors.

If you have other reasons for there still being confusion between VR and AR, please explain them to me and others. Maybe, one day the differences will be more clear to more people and we can all move more quickly towards the achievement of our goals.

What do you think? Share your thoughts by leaving a comment below! 

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