Augmented reality was imagined in a 1901 novel long before phones delivered it
In 1901 the novelist L. Frank Baum wrote about electronic spectacles that label everyone you meet with a mark revealing their character. It took most of a century for engineers to build anything similar. Today a phone held up to a room can place a product you are thinking of buying onto the real floor.
Augmented reality blends computer graphics into a live view of the world, unlike virtual reality, which swaps the world out entirely. A true system needs three things: a mix of real and virtual, interaction in real time, and precise alignment in three dimensions, so a digital object stays pinned to the table as you walk around it. The added layer can also subtract, masking parts of the scene rather than decorating them.
Pilots got the first taste. Head-up displays in the 1950s projected flight data onto glass so they could keep looking out of the cockpit. In 1968 Ivan Sutherland built the first see-through headset showing computer-drawn graphics, and in 1980 Steve Mann created a wearable computer that laid text over what its camera saw. An IBM researcher, Ron Feigenblatt, described the handheld magic window in 1986, the style later made famous by Pokémon Go. The name itself is credited to Thomas Caudell, a former Boeing researcher, around 1990.
Working immersive systems arrived in 1992, when Louis Rosenberg built Virtual Fixtures at an Air Force laboratory and showed that it helped people perform. Soon came odd firsts: overlaying satellite tracks on telescope video to spot space debris, and a 1994 medical prototype that let doctors see a fetus inside a patient.
Modern devices keep virtual objects steady by constantly estimating where the camera is and what shape the room has, using techniques such as SLAM. Phones rely on the rear camera; headsets like HoloLens use see-through optics or pass video to the eyes. Shops such as Lowe's let customers preview furniture at home, and architects can lay pipes and beams over a real building.
Source: Augmented reality
