IP Review Autumn 2017

3 Is this the real life? What exactly is AR? Most of you will be familiar with Virtual Reality (VR), a technology which involves full immersion into an entirely computer-generated fictional environment. AR, in contrast, involves overlaying virtual objects on a real environment. What you see as a user is therefore a combination of your real environment and what the AR application adds to it. An early adopter of AR was the aviation industry, where head-up displays, which overlay navigation information onto an aircraft pilot’s field of vision, are common. Fast forwarding to the present day, technology has developed to make AR easily accessible to anyone with a smartphone. Take for example the popular Pokémon GO! game released by Niantic in the summer of 2016, which made it entirely normal for us to be walking around catching virtual critters. On the social media side, Snapchat has made its dog filters (amongst others from its renowned set of facial lenses) and dancing hotdogs into an increasingly common form of social communication. + Augmented Reality Augmented Reality (AR) is a technology that has been around for decades, but only in recent years has it managed to break through to mainstream audiences, ultimately on the back of massive advances in smartphone technology. However, AR is still far from reaching its limits, with tech giants Intel and Microsoft pumping resources and funding into the development of a new generation of AR technology. Here we look at the current state of the art in AR, who and where the major players are and how we might expect to see this technology develop in the near future.