What is augmented reality and what are the challenges in future?

It’s amazing how technology is evolving in a short span of time. Once thought as impractical is now the reality. Who would have thought we could experience the natural environment simply by clicking a button on the smartphone sitting in the living room!

What is Augmented Reality?

Augmented Reality, in simple words is the advance technology that adds an extra layer of digital information by expanding into our physical world. It does not create any new artificial environment to replace the real one with the virtual environment. Rather, it appears in direct view of the existing environment and also adds videos, sounds, and graphics to make it more interactive and visually appealing.

Nowadays, AR, as Augmented Reality is fondly called, is widely used to improve the immersive viewing experience of the natural situations. With the help of advanced AR technologies such as object recognition, computer vision, the information about the surrounding real environment of the user becomes digital and interactive. You can view the real world situation with the computer generated superimposed images, thus changing the perception of reality.

Challenges of Augmented Reality

1. Lack of Proven Business Models: AR is new in the market. One of the silliest things about augmented technology is that it is still not doing good in business. Though it has been experiencing public acceptance and broad adoption, but companies have not been able to figure out an AR-related business model that would work long-term.
2. Low AR development and design standards: Standards are a universal language of a software application. It forms as a basis to secure its affinity and contribute towards the development of the technology. The tech is too new to devise any new standards and is still coming to its own in both software and hardware terms.
3. Privacy and security: Both security and privacy poses significant concerns for the AR industry. Due to lack of consistencies, foresightedness in AR programming, there is a huge amount of percentage of AR getting into trouble without the intention to do so. The biggest issues with AR is that there is no actual regulations which states the things allowed and disallowed in the AR environment.
4. Low quality of use cases and content: AR is rapidly expanding and developing in today’s world. But, not much has been recorded in terms of use cases and content. The majority of the AR related content is in App stores and it is showcase of simple tricks and not much else. Its goal is to present some brand as cunning and forward looking.

AR is a mind boggling innovation, equipped for transforming our lounge rooms into enchanted vistas using a mobile phone. The interesting property of AR to support a genuine social cooperation while playing a computer game is really an inconceivable accomplishment worth celebrating in its own right.