With the emergence of the fourth industrial revolution, the concept of Industry 4.0 has been introduced. It is actually the digital transformation of the manufacturing industries by the use of advanced technology like robotics, the Internet of Things, cybersecurity, artificial intelligence, augmented reality (AR), and virtual reality (VR). It is also called smart factories.
Out of these advanced techs, AR and VR are forming a bridge between the physical and imaginary world of manufacturing by forming a cyber-physical system. Augmented reality and virtual reality have revolutionized the manufacturing businesses from designing the product to its delivery in the real world. According to IDC, after 2021, worldwide spending on virtual and augmented reality is expected to double each year.
This article about Progressive web apps is about implementing Virtual Reality (VR) and Augmented Reality (AR) in your web app. For this, we use A-Frame and the WebXR Web API.
VR moves users to another world and lets them experience it as if they were themselves in this virtual world. AR, on the other hand, offers the possibility to blend the real and virtual worlds into one another. Both VR and AR offer unique opportunities for behavioral change, knowledge transfer, training, and research. For example, think of VR live streaming, social VR, and art. All this is now also possible in the browser!
Augmented reality is already becoming more commonplace by the day. Via smartphones, AR is already widely accessible throughout the world of gaming, entertainment, and even finance-based consumer applications. In terms of business, cloud access means that AR users can operate seemingly free from hardware while applications enable businesses to link the data-driven power of the computer with human judgment and expertise.
It’s this collaboration between rich data and human intervention that makes AR an ideal asset in the world of fintech. The sector is growing while augmented reality represents the next logical step in making finance run on brand new tech.
Augmented Reality (AR) and Virtual Reality (VR) get traction across industries far beyond gaming. Retail, manufacturing, transportation, healthcare, and other verticals leverage it more and more. This blog post explores a retail demo that integrates a cutting-edge augmented reality mobile shopping experience with the backend systems via the event streaming platform Apache Kafka.
Augmented Reality (AR) and Virtual Reality (VR)
Augmented reality (AR) is an interactive experience of a real-world environment where the objects in the real world are enhanced by computer-generated perceptual information. AR is a system that fulfills three basic features: a combination of real and virtual worlds, real-time interaction, and accurate 3D registration of virtual and real objects.
Given the number of variables and lack of empirical data, there’s simply no way to measure the number of people who need to wear glasses or contact lenses in the world. For instance, some people only need visionary aid to read, some to drive, some experience short or long-sightedness and others may simply turn to glasses as a fashion accessory. Of those who use contact lenses as well as eyeglasses, over 62% wear contact lenses more often.
Convenience, comfort, and flexibility of contact lenses are perhaps the most attributable factors to this high statistic. The small plastic lenses are incredibly portable, invisible, and negate the need to wear a whole frame on a user’s face. Contact lenses sit seamlessly on the curvature of the eye, giving the user a far wider field of view than glasses lenses - which often create blind spots and restrict vision. Contact lenses are typically less affected by adverse weather conditions such as fog and rain and are more suitable to wear when taking part in physical activity and competitive sports.
The revolutionary development of technology and the boundless use of mobile smart devices has holistically changed the way customers used to explore services and products before buying. To ensure worth every penny to be spent in buying a product or service, customers make sure they have some real-like experience exploring the same. This has been made possible by the most trending technology — Virtual Reality (VR).
We’re more than halfway through 2019, so let’s get real about what’s happening in virtual reality.
Across the globe, VR is exploding, and 2019 has been a year of progress, new releases, and innovations. Facebook’s Oculus Quest launched this past May, creating more interest in VR than ever and serious momentum across the consumer marketplace.
With the React VR framework, you are now able to build VR web apps. WebVR is an experimental API enabling the creation and viewing of VR experiences in your browser. The goal of this new technology by Oculus is granting access to virtual reality to everybody regardless of the devices at hand.
The only thing you need to make a React VR app is a headset and a compatible browser. No need even for a headset when you are just viewing a web VR application. React VR is a great framework to build VR websites or apps on JavaScript. It utilizes the same design as React Native and lets you make virtual reality tours and user interfaces with the provided components.
If you are migrating from the HoloToolkit to Mixed Reality Toolkit 2 'cold turkey,' as I am doing for my AMS HoloATC app, a lot of things break, as I already said in the first post of this series. For things that you can tap, you can simply change the implementing interface from IInputClickHandler or IManipulationHandler to a couple of other interface and change the signature a bit — that's not complex, only tedious, depending on how much you have used it.
What I found really hard was the removal of the Singleton class and the 3DTextFab. I used both quite extensively. The first one I needed for like data access classes as the concept of services that was introduced in the Mixed Reality Toolkit 2 was not yet available, and the other... well basically all my texts were 3DTextPrefabs so any kind of user feedback in text format was gone. Because so much breaks at the same time, it's very hard to step by step rebuilding your app to a working condition. Basically you have to change everything before something starts to work again. Since I was still learning by doing, there was no way to test if I was doing things more or less right. I got stuck and took a radical approach.
In this post, I want to talk a little about the hardware and platforms that developers are targeting for Virtual Reality (VR) and Augmented Reality (AR) apps and games.
At SlashData, their team runs regular surveys of software developers around the world to uncover valuable insights from those working in mobile, desktop, IoT, cloud, web, game, AR/VR, data science, and machine learning.
In this article, I’m going to talk about how I perceive the mainstream consumer audience to have rejected virtual reality, and suggest that its child, augmented reality, maybe the Slope of Enlightenment (of the Gartner Hype Cycle) that convinces us to buy in. While these are my views alone, towards the end of the piece, I’ve unearthed some data from software developers around the world who are working with AR and VR. Even if you don’t care about my views, you may find what they have to say interesting. And, if you’d like to express your own thoughts, I’ve included a link to a survey that’s open right now, the results of which will help key players in the industry to draw their own conclusions in 2019.
From
Wikipedia: The
hype cycle is a branded graphical presentation developed and used by the American research, advisory, and information technology firm Gartner to represent the maturity, adoption, and social application of specific technologies. The hype cycle provides a graphical and conceptual presentation of the maturity of emerging technologies through five phases. Image by Jeremykemp at English Wikipedia (
GFDL or
CC BY-SA 3.0).
Tomorrow’s World, Today
I worked in the smartphone industry before it came of age. Our mission was “a smartphone in every pocket” at a time when simple feature phones like the Motorola RAZR were the must-have communications device. Within a few years of our early projects, the competitor, Apple, launched the iPhone. The rest is history. The App Store opened its doors, the stars aligned, the technology dream was realized, and smartphones went on to rule the world.
