That was the headline in the Wall Street Journal, and they were talking about augmented reality which is not to be confused with its cousin, virtual reality. It is envisioned that augmented reality will transform how we interact with computers in the 21st century, it is a big claim, yes, but deal of the suggest that in five, 10 or even 20 years from now will be our point to his column and say he told us that. Currently the best-known example of AR is Google glass, which has pretty much been a failure. To understand what AR is you have to imagine a display that sits not on your desk or in your hand, but he's right in front of your eyes.
Today these displays are unwieldy, some of them looked like bulkier versions of safety glasses while others can either look like a bicycle helmet that went wrong, today's versions also have some severe limitations such as poor resolution and lag problems. However many technologists in this field believe that within five years these displays will be able to project a virtual image on any surface. To give you an idea of what they mean, take a look at your wrist, you are not wearing a watch or anything else but it appears as if you have a smart watch on your wrist, you could look at your hand and see a smart phone or even a tablet, that is what this technology wants to be.
The opposite end of the scale of course is that you could have, instead of a flat screen TV, a whole wall projection and stream the TV show you want to watch, the technology wants to be this versatile when it is perfected. Nearly every giant tech company is working on augmented reality, as stated before Google has already made an augmented reality device which anyone can buy, but Apple, Facebook, Samsung and Microsoft are all heavily engaged in research in this field. These giant corporations with vast fortunes are also buying smaller augmented reality companies almost daily and pouring money into their research.
As well as the giants in the industry trying to push the research ahead as fast as they possibly can there are also hundreds of startup companies that are staking claims in this area, one of them, Magic Leap Inc. raised $1.37 billion in capital before it even revealed its core product, most of the capital came from Google and other wealthy philanthropists. Goldman Sachs recently projected that the combined revenue from virtual reality and augmented reality devices would generate in excess of $80 billion in hardware sales by the year 2025, that is the same size as the current PC industry is.
Goldman Sachs also predicted that by 2025 augmented reality would by then to dwarf virtual-reality, the reason they stated for this prediction is they likened virtual-reality to today's PCs and augmented reality to a smart phone. The difficulty for the researchers is going to be the major technical challenges that are going to come out of augmented realities every day usage, this will be much easier with virtual-reality as it will require much less computing power to run a system.