Engineered Realities: A Fascinating Breakdown

It’s night time. We’re all asleep. We enter a trans-dimensional state where we are in a world created by our own minds. We cannot help but watch the events unfold as we seemingly are in no control of what is happening in front of our eyes. It’s almost like we’re in another world. As of now, technological advancement has made this and even more possible to witness with our own physical eyes. It’s truly amazing!

📷: Johann Savalle

What is Reality?

If I can’t touch you, does that mean you aren’t real? That is not quite true. Reality means much more than just touching or sensing the tangibility of things all around us. When something is real, we communicate with it. This doesn’t mean necessarily touching or talking to it but it could also mean a wide variety of ways we could sense the object. If we could sense an object in any possible way, it is considered real. Hence even if we cannot physically see music or sound, so long as we can sense it through hearing, it is real (backed up by the fact sound is a disturbance of molecules transferring energy). So where are we going to be talking about all these?

You see, technology has evolved so much that we can somewhat craft a reality in a way we desire to and fill it up with limitless options of elements. We can make a world of our dreams. This great gift to humanity which has been acquired through a feat of complex engineering is still miles away from completion but is already yielding great returns.

There are three types of engineered reality:

© Sony PlayStation VR

Virtual Reality, VR

As its name implies, it’s a total engineered reality that is completely virtual. It completely immerses the user into another world with no attachment to the real physical world. This means that everything seen in this reality is completely (I wouldn’t say fake) created from scratch. Consequentially, this subtly means that if we cannot interact with the created world around us, it isn’t virtual reality. For example, we have all sorts of media like 360° videos that enable you to look in all directions to see more information about the series of events happening but doesn’t necessarily enables you to interact with anything as you helplessly watch the occurrences unfold. Hence, they cannot be referred to as virtual realities as you cannot perform any action that consequentially affects the environment, albeit walking, picking up things, talking to the engineered person(s), etc.

With our current technology, we can access a world like this through the use of what is known as “Virtual Headsets”. These are gadgets which contain the basic features that allow us the proper and immersive experience of virtual reality. They include the lenses and sensors.

• Lenses: These are the eyes which allow us to completely perceive the virtual world. Without lenses, lack of immersion or field of view becomes a problem as we’d view the reality as inside of a rectangle. According to Wikipedia, the horizontal field of view for a normal human being is approximately 210° (some of this being peripheral vision). With lenses, we achieve a lesser but comparable field of view in the range of 170°~200°.
• Sensors: These are used to translate physical motions into the virtual world. This particular characteristic is currently limited to high-end headsets like the Oculus Rift, HTC Vive, Samsung Gear VR and so on. Budget headsets such as the Google Cardboard possess no sensors. Without these sensors, we cannot interact properly and seamlessly with the engineered reality and this may not make the experience a pleasant one (that is if the interaction is a must).

A display of AR prowess

Augmented Reality, AR

All of us have probably used this one way or another. AR share some similarities VR but it's different. For starters, it is a form of reality that relies upon our material world as it is by adding virtual elements to it. The most notable way we can currently experience AR is by using our smartphones. Yes, there are different kinds of AR apps that fill the internet and we can access them in the blink of an eye. For example, the world renowned Pokemon Go (developed by Niantic)  is possibly the most popular (along with Snapchat) AR-implemented app there is. You can see a Pokemon on your device like it is in the real world but in reality, it isn't there.

© Lens Studio

Almost the same happens with the Google Lenses. When you use these lenses to look at an object or a piece of text, real-time information is displayed on the lenses as if the information is attached to the object being looked at. We can manipulate these objects in our devices only, with no real consequence in the real world. It really requires a great feat of engineering and powerful software processes with the help of an in-built AI software system that is capable of analyzing the geometric properties of the real world and recognizing it or attaching a virtual object in sync to our physical reality. AR experience is developing a little slower than VR since it is a little harder to make gadgets/headsets that stitch the virtual to the real for full immersion as opposed to crafting a whole new world. 

© Arena Animation Ajmer

Mixed Reality, MR

This combines the two forms of reality previously extrapolated on to create a whole new breathtaking form of reality. The Mixed Reality (MR) brings into play a whole new ball game. As earlier said, it combines both VR and AR in the manner of engineering excellence as so:

• Like AR, it stitches together virtual objects to the real world and,
• Like VR, it allows us to affect the created reality.

So what do we get?

We get an engineered reality where we can see virtual objects in the real world (albeit with a headset) and manipulate them like they're in the real world (and not only in our devices). For instance, if we see a basketball while using the headset, we can go close to it and hit it with our hand (as if it was really there) and it moves in response to the actions which is detected by sensors. This reality is a lot more difficult to engineer but a few companies engage in it. An example is Microsoft with its Microsoft Hololens™ which brings virtual interaction and things like business project development or even  internet video chatting to a whole new level. 

See it below.

🎥: ColdFusion (Via YouTube)

We are still a ways from inculcating these engineering feats into our everyday lives but we've started down this path and there seems to be no reason to stop now. The future of technology looks promising and so does the future of engineered realities.