Why and How to Get Into Virtual Reality
The concept of virtual reality has been around for decades. In 1938, William Gruber and Harold Graves invented the View-Master, which was a stereoscope that became a popular toy in the decades that followed and is still manufactured today by the Mattel toy company. The View-Master may have been the first actual example of virtual reality app development. It allowed you to insert round photographic disks into the device which rendered in 3D when you looked through the lens.
Flash forward to the 1980s, when VPL Research founder Jaron Lanier coined the term “virtual reality.” Lanier had been working at Atari when he left to form VPL (Virtual Programming Languages) along with Thomas Zimmerman, the inventor of the data glove. VPR was one of the first virtual reality development companies and was eventually bought out by Sun Microsystems in 1999.
VR was thrust into the limelight again when Facebook acquired Oculus back in 2014. That launched a wave of startups developing new apps featuring virtual reality. Now virtual reality is becoming a part of our everyday lives. New VR games and mobile apps are being introduced on a daily basis. Retail stores are incorporating VR in both their brick-and-mortar stores as well as online. [more]
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How Augmented Reality is Changing the Business World
It all started with Pokémon Go. Although augmented reality app development has been popular for quite some time, no one really knew the impact it could have on the business world until the Pokémon Go frenzy happened in 2016.
When the game launched, millions of kids (and a lot of adults) were running around their local streets and towns, holding up mobile devices and trying to capture invisible creatures. Never before had a mobile game developer held such attention from not only a captive, but completely obsessed audience.
The success of Pokémon Go made it apparent to other types of businesses that in order to attract and hold the attention of today’s generation of mobile obsessed consumers, they’d have to get very creative. Augmented reality products became part of a lot of companies’ marketing plans soon after. And the number of tech companies developing augmented reality solutions skyrocketed. [more]
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Sydney Stone | freelance writer & editor 