The History of Augmented Reality
Augmented reality (AR) has been a work in process since its conception in the early 1990’s when Boeing researcher Tom Caudell coined the term. Its use was primarily reserved for expensive operations, in fact, one of the earliest functioning AR systems was built for the Air Force; these were virtual fixtures that allowed the military to control virtually guided machinery to perform tasks from a remote operating space. Up until the turn of the century, AR was not widely used or even known to the masses. In order to use AR, one had to deal with complicated software and bulky expensive equipment. This changed drastically when Hirokazu Kato from the Nara Institute of Science and Technology released a state of the art program: the ARToolKit. The ARToolKit allowed video capturing and tracking of the real world and combined it with virtual objects, effectively creating the platform we use today. This ARToolKit paved the way for AR to reach average consumers, mainly gamers. In early 2000 Bruce Thomas from Wearable Computer Lab showcased the first outdoor, mobile AR video game using Kato’s toolkit. This game, ARQuake allowed users to see different views of the game based on their physical location and required only a head-mounted-gyroscope display and a computer backpack. Years later, as early 2008 AR applications began showing up on smartphones as simple map-guided points of interest applications. Over the years, developers shifted their focus to bring AR to even more consumers, this came in the form video games and has proved to increase AR’s reach exponentially. One example of this is perhaps of what is known to be the most popular mobile game of 2016, for better and for worse -- Pokemon Go. Yes, this game was extremely buggy at its initial release and remained with its share of problems and sure, it wasn’t the first AR mobile game released; however, Pokemon Go does a lot of things right in AR. It's a pure representation of what layering information into a global map can feel like in the future. The early months of Pokemon Go were filled with positivity throughout, anywhere you went you saw packs of “trainers” walking about all the otherwise seldom-used public spaces and parks solely because you could see adorable and rare creatures roaming around you through your phone's camera thanks to the AR technology. This was something at a global scale, a worldwide craze that somehow made everything more real and less at the same time; the creatures on your screen of course weren’t real but many people went out of their way and formed real bonds with people they had never met simply because they were walking around our real environment playing the same game.