Use Cases of Reality, Augmented Reality and Virtual Reality

Taking a look at what is the point of reality, where can AR help and when is full virtual reality useful. Why VR has not caught on and is underwhelming.

Reality is a way to retrieve information or goods (be it virtual goods or physical) from a kind of "menu". This "menu" may be complex, encompassing the selection of various suppliers/providers. Multiple channels or bridges, VPNs, servers, roads, shops, streets in between etc. maybe needed and traversed, but that is just a complication of the communication path. Ultimately, you end up digging deeper, arriving at your destination and selecting a source for that thing you need and retrieve it (or get it delivered to you). Then in the end, you have the input that you need.

The goal of that input may be to sustain your physical body, to learn, to use it for a job etc. you know what you usually do in life ;-)

Or it may be the other way around: You may need to provide, fix or publish something. Then you also need to find the right place in some "menu" and come to the right spot, the place where your audience is (some forum, group, community, podium, stream) and then you output that thing which you want to do there: Do repairs, provide a service, publish some information etc.

Some of that can be mapped to augmented reality, if there is a connection to physical real-world objects, like doing repairs on a physical machine and you get augmented repair information of that device. If the object of value is located in physical reality, then AR would be the right choice.

An intermediate step is to display virtual information that has no connection to any physical object in an augmented reality, like windows, displays, documents. Also possible is a reduction of virtual information so that for example nodes or graphs can be displayed and massive amounts of data can be shown. Imagine a strategic "command table" with symbols representing vehicles, ships, planes etc. These could be shown in an augmented reality projected onto a real-world table - augmenting it with virtual information, that has no direct relation to that table but uses it as a basis to display some virtual information on top of it. What is needed is some compelling use-case that is better than a simple 2D screen, keyboard and mouse.

When is virtual reality needed? When no mapping to any real objects are possible, needed or wanted. When the information to present is too complex, too outworldly or of greater distance than any augmented reality could provide. When it would not even make sense to display the thing you retrieve/input or deliver/output using some simplified representation like mentioned before. Then only virtual reality can help. But you see, AR representations can help a lot to project virtual objects into a space so virtual reality with its full immersion is not needed in many instances. VR is useful only to immerse someone into a completely different room/world/area ... useful for games and simulations. But even flight simulator controls could be projected on a table, so.. that is why VR has not caught on as much as it was expected. Also because the devices needed take you out of the real world (that is their point...) with cludgy devices and glasses. And the virtual realities have a much higher bar of realism for being believable and immersive whereas AR objects have a much lower bar for becoming useful tools. Creating a world-wide synchronized state of a detailed universe is not easy at all and the physics of fiber optic and radio-based communication simply counter-act that. No game universe with low-latency detailed virtual interactions is ever world-wide synchronized. There are always regional servers.

In summary, AR has much higher potential at the moment (2022) but even AR needs a "killer application" that is able to overcome the "good enough" of Web-based experiences on a 2D screen with keyboard and mouse. Comments welcome.

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