ABSTRACT
On this continuum, AR would be placed closer to the real environment extremum and an AR display would primarily display real-world objects. Wellner et al. also differentiated between virtual and augmented reality; they emphasized AR’s ability to let users interact with the physical world instead of enclosing them in a virtual environment, as would be the case with virtual reality:
Another view of the future of computing is emerging, taking the opposite approach from VR. Instead of using computers to enclose people in an artificial world, we can use computers to augment objects in the real world. We can make the environment sensitive with infra-red, optical sound, video, heat, motion and light detectors, and we can make the environment react to people’s needs by updating displays, activating motors, storing data, driving actuators, controls and valves. With see-through displays and projectors, we can create spaces in which everyday objects gain electronic properties without losing their familiar physical properties. Computer-augmented environments merge electronic systems into the physical world instead of attempting to replace them. Our everyday environment is an integral part of these systems; it continues to work as expected, but with new integrated computer functionality. (26)
In 1998, Wendy E. Mackay provided an extended notion of AR. Here, it was not just the user who was “augmented” through head-worn displays. Instead, she allowed for augmented objects where “the physical object is changed by embedding input, output or computational devices on or within it” (Mackay 13), thus turning regular into “smart” objects (Barba et al. 930). Also, there are augmentations to the user’s and object’s environment – as in the case of interactive paper – that allow users to “see and interact with electronic information without wearing special devices or modifying the objects they interact with” (Mackay 15). As Barba et al. put it, Mackay’s vision of augmented reality “was understood to connote technologies that took everyday objects and activities and enhanced them in some way. Making activities more collaborative or more personalized, and giving objects memory or awareness, were all ways of ‘augmenting’ user experiences” (930). Mackay herself emphasized the enhanced user experiences that augmented objects could provide: “The future we envision is not a strange world in which we are immersed in ‘virtual reality.’ Instead, we see our familiar world, enhanced in numerous, often invisible ways” (20).
