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That’s why I’d think of VR as a special case of AR. As you said, VR is in many ways is “easier”. So I’d think of VR as a special case of AR where the environmen

That’s why I’d think of VR as a special case of AR. As you said, VR is in many ways is “easier”. So I’d think of VR as a special case of AR where the environment is also computer generated. In other words, moving from VR to AR would require a ton of extra work to integrate the real world. But moving from AR to VR should be much more straightforward, albeit in many ways equally challenging because now you have to worry about two worlds - the normal overlay of AR and the environment from VR. Now that I’ve said that, maybe I should think of them as more like related disciplines instead of special cases of each other...

moron4hire 7y ago
Depends if you're talking from the perspective of the hardware/OS developer, or the application software developer. For the system, AR is definitely harder. For the software developer, AR is "easier", if you're like most developers and are only treating an AR headset as a bad VR headset and just plunking 3D content down in some random place on the user's floor. You don't have to create the environment--the user supplies that. And you user's input modalities are so limited that you don't really have a lot of options on what sort of interactions you can design. For smartphone AR apps, you're basically just making a standard smartphone app that happens to have a 3D view in it. For headset AR apps, you're basically just making the "hunt-and-peck" version of what you could make on modern VR systems with much higher fidelity control systems.