Mixed reality
[5] Mixed reality has been used in applications across fields including design, education, entertainment, military training, healthcare, product content management, and human-in-the-loop operation of robots.
[6] In addition, AR has shown effectiveness in university education for health science and medical students within disciplines that benefit from 3D representations of models, such as physiology and anatomy.
The 2004 British game show Bamzooki called upon child contestants to create virtual "Zooks" and watch them compete in a variety of challenges.
[10] Unlike Bamzoomi's generally non-violent challenges, the goal of FightBox was for new contestants to create the strongest fighter to win the competition.
[10] In 2009, researchers presented to the International Symposium on Mixed and Augmented Reality (ISMAR) their social product called "BlogWall", which consisted of a projected screen on a wall.
[11] Mario Kart Live: Home Circuit is a mixed reality racing game for the Nintendo Switch that was released in October 2020.
[14] The first fully immersive mixed reality system was the Virtual Fixtures platform, which was developed in 1992 by Louis Rosenberg at the Armstrong Laboratories of the United States Air Force.
Published studies showed that by introducing virtual objects into the real world, significant performance increases could be achieved by human operators.
[19][20] Mixed reality technologies have been used by the United States Army Research Laboratory to study how this stress affects decision-making.
[28][29] Examples of blended spaces include augmented reality devices such as the Microsoft HoloLens and games such as Pokémon Go in addition to many smartphone tourism apps, smart meeting rooms and applications such as bus tracker systems.
No matter where they are physically located, an employee can wear a headset and noise-canceling headphones and enter a collaborative, immersive virtual environment.
Larger companies with multiple manufacturing locations and a lot of machinery can use mixed reality to educate and instruct their employees.
Instructors can operate the representation that every employee sees, and can glide through the production area, zooming in to technical details and explaining every change needed.
This enables training and execution of maintenance, operational and safety work processes, which would otherwise be difficult in a live setting, while making use of expertise, no matter their physical location.
[38][39] Smartglasses can be incorporated into the operating room to aide in surgical procedures; possibly displaying patient data conveniently while overlaying precise visual guides for the surgeon.
[40][41] Mixed reality headsets like the Microsoft HoloLens have been theorized to allow for efficient sharing of information between doctors, in addition to providing a platform for enhanced training.
[44] Product content management before the advent of mixed reality consisted largely of brochures and little customer-product engagement outside of this 2-dimensional realm.
[47] Human operators wearing mixed reality glasses such as HoloLens can interact with (control and monitor) e.g. robots and lifting machines[48] on site in a digital factory setup.
This use case typically requires real-time data communication between a mixed reality interface with the machine / process / system, which could be enabled by incorporating digital twin technology.
[50] 3D glasses and surround sound complement the projections to provide the user with a sense of perspective that aims to simulate the physical world.
[53] The original projections were substituted for 37 megapixel 3D LCD panels, network cables integrate the CAVE2 with the internet, and a more precise camera system allows the environment to shift as the user moves throughout it.
One of the first applications of HUD in automotive transport came with Pioneer's Heads-up system, which replaces the driver-side sun visor with a display that projects navigation instructions onto the road in front of the driver.
Its applications range across medicine, entertainment, aviation, and engineering, providing a layer of visual immersion that traditional displays cannot achieve.
[57] Head-mounted displays are most popular with consumers in the entertainment market, with major tech companies developing HMDs to complement their existing products.
Microsoft's HoloLens is an augmented reality HMD that has applications in medicine, giving doctors more profound real-time insight, as well as engineering, overlaying important information on top of the physical world.
