The immersive, head-mounted displays of many VR systems intentionally shut out the viewer's visual experience of the environment and substitute an alternative reality intended to look like the real thing. Because this type of VR replaces one view of a "real" world with another, we sometimes call this replacement reality. Perhaps the more interesting type of VR is augmented reality, in which transparent goggles (or the digital equivalent) present a view of the actual, "out there" environment with a superimposed virtual, or information environment. Thus, augmented reality creates private views of a world in which information has been superimposed on physical things, such as rooms and buildings, paths or roads. By integrating subsystems that identify where the user is (via global positioning, or GPS) and where she is looking (via head-tracking systems), plus wireless technology to connect the user to information servers, mobile augmented reality systems (MARS) can provide fully interactive, live experiences in which information and virtual objects appear linked in context to tangible objects and locations in the physical environment. Moreover, the information environment that is overlaid on our view of the physical environment need not be contemporaneous with our current world, but could show what this place looked like in the past or might look like at some time in the future.
JL

< back