What a lot of people don’t understand about the online world is that a big proportion of people still crave the physical interaction that the real world provides. This is why even though online shopping is bigger than ever before, shopping centers still get lots of visitors. Tech companies have been trying to close the gap between physical and digital entities for a number of years now and it appears that augmented reality is the solution to this issue.
Augmented reality has been used in a number of different ways, some more successful than others. We’ve taken a look at what it can potentially offer in the near future and what could come our way further down the line.
Fully interactive online casinos
This is something that is seen as vital to the development of online casinos in the future. Online casinos have been trying to create a realistic environment for players for years now. This has led to the development of live dealer casino games, but it’s still not quite at the stage where the physical and digital lines start to blur.
Augmented reality offers the potential for things to be taken to the next level. While there are no solid plans at this moment in time, there has been some discussion about using AR to create a more immersive environment to place your bets.
The ability to turn your house into a casino by using a mobile device is one possibility that’s currently on the table. It would use similar technology to Pokémon GO, which could lead to players walking to different areas of their house and having what is shown on the screen change as navigation takes place. It could also combine current live dealer technology with VR technology to provide an almost perfect digital recreation of a brick-and-mortar casino.
How media is consumed
Netflix has had a huge hand in transforming how media is consumed by users on a large scale. Streaming turned into one of the biggest innovations in the last 100 years, and now almost every media company offers streaming in some form to its customers. But how can AR transform how media is consumed by users?
Put simply, it can help create new layers of interactive media. The success of Bandersnatch on Netflix shows that interactive movies and TV shows have a large potential audience. So, how can AR be used to implement interactive content?
Can you imagine watching an interactive movie and a character is given 20 seconds to defuse a bomb. You then have to defuse that bomb yourself. That’s what AR can offer to an interactive movie. It won’t just help to create immersion within a movie, but it will also give consumers a sense of urgency that could ramp movies up to a whole new level of enjoyment.
It’s not just movies that this can be applied to either. Video games could have extra immersion provided to them with AR. Even reading comic books could be a new and more immersive experience. AR truly offers the ability to completely blur the line between the physical and the digital when it comes to consuming media.
What’s possible in the future?
The future of AR is obviously aimed at becoming a part of the human experience in everyday life. Early examples of this include items such as smart glasses. This is a relatively new technology and as it’s early in its life cycle it isn’t showing anything that really makes it stand out yet. However, just like any new technology, it’s still finding its feet at the moment and has a lot of potential to offer lifestyle improvements.
The obvious next step in smart glasses technology would be to provide actual augmentations to human eyes. This would allow people to apply various filters to what they see in everyday life. A truly useful option could be allowing doctors to access a patient’s medical history through the glasses as they carry out a diagnosis. This combined with up-to-date information on the latest medical technology could make patient care better and more effective than it’s ever been before.
It’s not just diagnosis that could be helped by this technology either. People with vision issues or trouble with their eyes could receive a technological replacement which would use AR technology to provide visual signals to the brain. We are a long way off the technology being enhanced to that level at the moment, but it is the long-term aim for smart glasses tech.
