Watch: The Amazing Potential of Extended Reality

On our DigitalScot.live webinar conference, David Sime talked about the many applications of Virtual and Augmented Reality for education, healthcare, marketing, and business communications.

David Sime is the Director of Oncor Reality Ltd and he is a multi award winning AR and VR production manager with over 21 years of digital media experience.

David speaks and lectures all over the world on emerging technology for industrial, educational, marketing and medical applications. A published author of both academic and broader readership publications, David is a regular contributor to magazine newspapers and academic journals including Springer, Forbes and IGI Global.

Before summarizing the video, let’s see what is Virtual and Augmented Reality.

Virtual Reality

Virtual Reality (VR) is the use of computer technology to feel real life experience. VR places the user inside an experience. Here users are immersed into 3D worlds and to some extent can interact too. By simulating as many senses as possible, such as vision, hearing, touch, even smell, the computer is transformed into a gatekeeper to this artificial world.

Augmented Reality

Augmented reality (AR) is almost same to virtual reality but there are many differences as well. It is an enhanced version of the real physical world that is achieved through the use of digital visual elements, sound, or other sensory stimuli delivered via technology. Augmented Reality or AR is a growing trend among companies involved in mobile computing and business applications in particular.

Video Summary

David Sime has been working in digital marketing and digital communications for the last 21 years now. Because of marketing is about 70 percent research and only about 30 percent promotion, he moved into digital marketing giving him the ability to see how long people were engaging with content online.

He noticed that it was a very short time in comparison to traditional media and it was getting shorter all the time. As time passed, he started to move in the direction of more image-based marketing because people weren’t reading as long as text as they had been before and more image or picture speaks a thousand words. Attention span continued to shrink as connection speeds went up and there was more variety online.

In the next five years, we will be communicating with technology around us using no physical interface but just our brain waves. It’s already happening and soon those devices will be communicating with us. This is called Direct Brain Interface (DBI). This is likely to become very commonplace within the next five years. Here’s the proof that it is possible:

The XR (It’s a combination of augmented and virtual reality together) was worth $5 Billion back in 2018. The projection for XR in 2023 is to double that, to $11.3 billion, and this projection was made before the Covid-19 situation.

One of the biggest changes that we’re going to have in the short term is that wearable Augmented Reality is going to become commonplace.

The reason for that is what it called ‘form factor’. Form factor is the shape and the size and the usability of the tools that we use in product design. Previously if you wanted to use augmented reality, we had two choices. Either we would point our mobile phone at things which is a clunky and not ideal and it uses up our hands and people feel uncomfortable wandering around like that. It looked ridiculous and there’s absolutely no way we would be walking down the street and in front of public wearing this thing and so that cuts off most of the use cases.

When it comes to marketing navigation and all sorts of other things that we would want to use this for the new slew of around about 20 new devices which hit the market this year.

It means that form factor is going to be akin to these, although it’s not quite there yet but it’s getting there and they’ve done it harnessing the processing power in our phones.

So really the glass has just become a display device and using something called waveform technology which just means that the lens reflects the image back to our eyes from little projectors which are around us. We can see everything around us perfectly fine.

There will be gloves that will allow people who are using augmented virtual reality not only to pick up objects like real life but we will feel it too. So, when we will pick up an object, our fingers will be stopped in place. We will feel the texture and temperature of that object.

Another thing that will change the landscape is SLAM. Slam stands for simultaneous location and mapping. It means the device knows where we are and where we are looking. It takes photos of places using lidar. Lidar is light version of radar. Slam can create three dimensional photos that looks photorealistic.

Virtual Reality is when we are fully immersed in digital environment. Augmented reality on the other hand is seeing the real world around us and we are seeing a digital overlay additional information of maintaining the real world around us.

A Tesla Suit can create a sensory feedback while we are wearing the virtual reality. It can be the sensational touch or temperature. It can restrict our motion and movement whilst at working at our movement range. It’s very good for physiotherapy.

Augmented reality is used in retail. It can i) increase store visitors, ii) better customer engagement, iii) enhance print media iv) reduce product return rate, v) better UX customizable content, vi) break language barriers, etc.

Video Timeline

0:00 – Introduction
1:20 – David Sime Speech
5:34 – Global XR Revenue Forecast
12:45- What is SLAM
14:44 – Brain computer Interaction
16:58 – Virtual and Augmented Reality
17:45- Virtual Reality
18:44- Tesla Suit
21:31- Augmented Reality
24:26 – Benefits of Augmented Reality in Retail
25:26- Q & A Sections