The difference between AR and VR

Hello everyone, today I’m writing here because I want to clarify one thing, one that generate lots of confusion between tech enthusiasts these days: the difference between Augmented Reality and Virtual Reality. But I will do more, I’ll also give you a more detailed vision of the virtuality-reality spectrum… and all the possible adult applications. So, let’s go!

Let’s start first by the Reality, the “real reality”: you already know what this is (the world all around you), so I’ won’t detail it more :).

Very close to reality you have the Contextual Reality, that is a reality enhanced with some little virtual info that you can see somewhere in your field of view. These pieces of information are usually textual ones relative to the current context you’re in and are usually shown in a little screen that you have installed near one of your eyes. Does this remind you something? If the answer is the Google Glass, yes, you’re right… they’re the most famous example of Contextual Reality… maybe not the best example, due to the fact that they died of a terrible death :). I’ve tried them some years ago: they were really rough, seeing this little screen with only one eye was terrible and the device had serious issues of battery and overheating. Nonetheless the marketing tried to sell it as a consumer-ready product and so lots of people was disappointed and the project was canceled.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JSnB06um5r4

The adult applications of contextual reality are very few… even if someone found a way to use it during sex… quite funny!

If you go beyond the contextual reality, you start entering the Augmented Reality field. You have an augmented reality when you can clearly see all the world around you, plus some virtual objects inside it. This objects may be of every kind, textual information like during football matches or even 3D objects that looks exactly like real objects! You can move, you can jump, you can scream… whatever you do, the virtual objects stays there like if they were real-world objects inside your room. A clear example of augmented reality are the HoloLens glasses, but there are lots of other examples like the Meta 2 or Magic Leap (which is a company around which there is a lot of hype, but from which no one has ever seen a public prototype demo!).

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TyXePLD54uU

Maybe you’ve played Pokemon Go at least once… well, that’s a clear example of very basic augmented reality! The super cool feature of Augmented Reality is that you can see your true world with additional things, i.e. you can shape the world around you as you want. AR is predicted to be part of our everyday life in 5 to 10 years. This means that we’ll all wear some kind of AR glasses or eye contact lenses every day and this will be the new paradigm of human-technology interface. Something like the Eyephone in Futurama…

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eJyMEkb_8to

AR will be pervasive in every sector of our life: we’ll meet distant people just seeing their “hologram” in the sofa of our living room, we’ll decorate our houses with virtual furniture, we’ll have technicians helping us just following and guiding us from remote, showing us what to do in front of our eyes. Of course it will be pervasive for adult sector too: it has not been explored that much yet (because AR glasses are very few and expensive), but surely will change the way we think about porn: we could have virtual sex in our bedroom with girls from the other side of the world, we could see our favourite pornstar just next to us on the sofa, we could have a 3D recorded sex scene played in our house and watch it from all sides just walking around it. It will be awesome! Let’s just wait some more months…

Continuing along the reality->virtuality spectrum, we find the Augmented Virtuality. This is a bit tricky: you are in a completely virtual world, but you see this virtual world enhanced with real world elements (like your hands or people around you). I admit I don’t catch exactly the applications of this technology, but Intel with its new project Alloy is strongly believing in this, so… let’s see what will happen!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=phUg9yijqPs

Then we arrive at the other side of the spectrum: the Virtual Reality. With Virtual Reality you’re completely inside a virtual world, completely immersed. You put on a headset, like Oculus, Vive or GearVR and you lose completely contact from the real world around you, but you’re completely dedicated to a computer-generated world. You can be inside a 3D video or a 3D generated world (like in a video game). You should know what this technology is because it is the one used inside this website! I’d just like to add two more things about VR:

1. There are people for whom Virtual Reality is any kind of virtual world you’re in, even if you don’t use a headset: for these people, if you’re playing Doom on your PC, you’re playing a virtual reality experience, because you’re playing with a completely virtual world. These kind of people distinguish this kind of virtual reality from Oculus-like one, because they call the latter as “Immersive Virtual Reality”. IMHO this is all a useless dispute, but you have to know that there are strange people in this world;
2. VR is not a vision-only experience! There are virtual reality devices to emulate also audio (3D audio, like in Oculus headset), haptics (exoskeletons and gloves to give you the sense of touch), smells (well, the Nosulus Rift is something you can’t forget about!) and even taste!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=22KZBhrksbk

About adult usage of VR… well, you’re on vrporn.com baby! Just take a look at the videos and see what this technology can give to you! (come on, why are you reading this techie post when you’ve so many fancy videos ready for you?! :D) You can see yourself as if you were in another place, with some really enterprising girls wanting to spend some entertaining times with you :). At the moment the technology is all about video and audio, but think about what I’ve said about touch, smell and taste… all experiences (even porn) could become really a lot more immersive, tricking completely your brain in thinking that you’re really there living those awesome moments.

Ok, hope to have clarified you everything. Just a final addition. Lots of people ask if it is better AR or VR: well, the answer is that it depends. AR is perfect if you want to have an enhanced interaction with the world surrounding you… if you want to live your life as always, but with some addition, some power-up… and that’s why it will be a super-pervasive technology. VR is great if you want to isolate, if you want to do a “magic trip” towards somewhere else, to live amazing experiences and forget about your daily life. In VR all emotions are amplified, so for experiences like horror movies it’s awesome! In the future I’m quite sure that the difference will become a lot blurred and that the same kind of glasses will offer to their users the ability to play both AR and VR experiences.

Well, it’s enough for today… I thought that a bit of theory was necessary. Hope you enjoyed this article… and if you have questions, don’t feel afraid to ask!