Extreme Networks Office of the CTO, Guest Blog: Tom Brannen is an independent industry analyst focusing on enterprise collaboration technologies. You can reach Tom at www.onconvergence.com
While virtual reality (VR) and augmented reality (AR) often get lumped into the same category, they are two different technologies with different hardware, software and use cases. They also have two unique journeys, running parallel over the last half a century. Both VR and AR have moved from fiction to research projects and now consumer-ready devices that are being adopted worldwide for personal and business use. The modern versions of both VR and AR are in their very early stages. They have been around for only six and three years respectively, with the Rift/Vive being the first VR device to be released, and the HoloLens 2 being the latest augmented reality device released by Microsoft.
The ability to digitally augment real-life vision is a concept that has been introduced decades ago, with early prototypes going back to the 1960s. Still, technological developments have brought AR to the present as a capable and transformational technology, poised to be the center point of our digital lives over the next decade.
In a previous blog, we shared with you a timeline infographic about VR. We’ve also created an infographic that traces the history of augmented reality (AR) and shows how the technology has evolved toward a glimpse of the future.
While it is difficult to predict the timing of future developments in emerging tech, over the next decade, both AR and VR will eventually become the centerpiece of our digital lives in the future. The devices we use today will be replaced by AR/VR devices, providing us with captivating experiences at work and home that we can’t even dream of today.
You can grab the full PDF version of this AR infographic via the link below. So, please take a moment to download the PDF, print it out in full color, and display it in your office. Be sure to share it with your tech-savvy friends—their lives will be transformed via augmented reality, too.
