Definition
Augmented Reality and Virtual reality, often shortened as AR and VR, are two technologies which have been developped along the last decade with technological similarities but serving different purposes, especially for the industry.
Augmented Reality (AR) can be defined as the superposition in our field of vision of virtual elements over the reality we are facing. The goal is to “Augment” the reality with additional information relative to what a person is seeing.
Virtual Reality (VR) is the representation of a fully artifical universe where the user is immersed in a 3D world where he can “live” through screen and motion sensors.
The goal of VR is to position the user in a specific environment to simulate its interactions.
Comments
If we look at the similarities, AR and VR are leveraging on the same pieces of equipment (mostly headsets, tablets, smartphones) and technology bricks to engage users in a tranformed immediate reality.
But both technology differs from their level of immersion.
While AR will keep the user in his close reality supplementing a layer of virtual objects or information (e.g. data), VR will completely simulate a whole new world for a 100% immersion.
This difference modifies fundamentally the user experience and the purposes of AR and VR.
While AR technology can be used for a long period of time by operators, the VR experience is limited to short periods of time as the full immersion confuses body perceptions resulting in headaches.
On the other end, fields of applications are not limited.
AR technology appears as the best solution to empower operators and people on the field as it enables to easily connect a multitude of services.
Some Use cases have already proven their interests; as the capacity to display running data and documentation of an asset by filming it, or the possibility to be guided by an expert during a maintenance operation via a visio call.
VR is not outdone because, it allows to transport users in any location or situation at small cost.
Trainings of operators can be performed from anywhere in the world, facilitating and accelerating the course.
The simulation also enables teams to repeat and train for critical maintenance operations, for more efficiency and safety.
In the hands of the Engineers, VR allows a first visualization of design and construction to commission an asset before lauching expensive and slow prototyping process.
Not yet matured, both AR and VR technologies are still making important progresses to increase their confort and scope of applications. Given the already added and potential values of AR & VR in the industry, these two technologies deserve to be more implemented in the energy sector.
Far from excluding one another, both technologies are applying to different scope of the industry, thus should be considered in parallel by End-Users for more efficiency.
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