Augmented reality blends digital with real-world views
Augmented reality enhances everyday sights by layering digital information, images, and animations onto the real world via smartphones and smart glasses, blending the physical and virtual.
Augmented reality (AR) overlays digital information onto your real-world view, creating an interactive mix of physical and virtual environments. Devices like smartphones or AR glasses use cameras and sensors to superimpose computer-generated elements in real time. For example, apps like IKEA Place let you visualize virtual furniture in your own room. This technology, first coined in the 1990s for aircraft maintenance, gained mass appeal with Pokémon GO in 2016, which amassed over 500 million downloads. AR enriches experiences without isolating users, unlike virtual reality, offering transformative potential in fields from education to medicine.