Creativity and Technology
Discuss what areas in the article relate to your field of study/future employment and what applications of AR can you envision would be of benefit to you professionally or otherwise in the future? Is there a different contemporary technology that you believe is more relevant to your field? How so? (Downey, S. (2016, October 25). The Gigantic List of Augmented Reality Use Cases. Retrieved from http://uploadvr.com/)
As I have researched on the aspects of my future employment of being a game designer, I began to understand more of the fundamentals of technology that can greatly benefit the workplace of a game designer. The technologies that I found to be notably essential to this industry are the “Virtual Reality” and the “Augmented Reality”. What these technologies would be essential towards the gaming side is the use of VR and AR in games. What I believe is also important to note is the demand of these particular technologies will most likely improve and be used by more individuals popularising these as entertainment or tools at the workplace.
Virtual Reality or ‘VR’ for short is a technology that creates a digital immersive experience that blocks out the real world (Downey, 2016). To me it would be ideal to have a better understanding for what VR is capable of as it would seem that games are being made for VR and big brand companies are developing around the technology. An example of this statement is the company Sony PlayStation released a VR headset 3 years ago call the PlayStation VR (PlayStation, 2016). It’s not just designing a game for VR something it could only do, VR can help the workplace be more productive. This can be achieved by having a simulation of the workplace done in VR. What this accomplishes is that the user would have a better understanding of the workplace and the simulation can deliver feedback of areas the employee has done well and other areas they have not done so well.
Augmented Reality or to abbreviate ‘AR’ is a similar technology to VR in a way of how the user is digitally immersed in the technology but the different lies in how it becomes immersive. How it does this is by having the technology add digital elements to the real world rather than block it (Downey, 2016). An Example of AR being implemented is on apps that apply digital elements through the camera lenses on phones. A specific app that contains AR and is known by a large amount of people is Pokémon GO (Game freak, 2016). By the use of AR it can convey information to the user that is essential to the workforce on demand, for Instance AR can utilise management of data on demand without opening up a file.
As much as I find these technologies to have major drawbacks that can cause the user to be anti-social from preventing the need to communicate with others, I can see that VR and AR might have a place in the future. As I witness particular apps containing AR content and video games being played by using VR, it would seem that these technologies are becoming more of use to society as beyond anyone’s expectation. It appears that they would be further developed on as it might reach to a point similar to what computers and mobile phones were thought off decades ago. Even though it is hard to accept, it would appear VR and AR are not going away as they are now something that is a part off society and something unexpected might come from this kind of future.
References
Downey, S. (2016, October 25). The Gigantic List of Augmented Reality Use Cases. Retrieved from http://uploadvr.com/
Sony PlayStation. (2016). PlayStation VR (game console). Japan: Sony.
Game freak. (2016). Pokémon GO (video game). Japan: Nintendo.
