Picture Courtesy: www.zimbio.com

The future of gaming seems brighter with the new developments and investments in the field of augmented and virtual reality. Virtual reality is an artificial environment that is created with software and presented to the user in such a way that the user suspends belief and accepts it as a real environment. On a computer, virtual reality is primarily experienced through two of the five senses: sight and sound as it takes us into a different world.

Till date the Oculus Rift, which the Facebook purchased for $2 billion, and Samsung are the ones to release VR sets for experiencing virtual reality. For now it may not seem much as it lags in resolution but it is indeed a good foundation with boundless possibilities.

The main problem VR is facing is that the players of Nintendo’s Virtual Boy reported “players really enjoyed it for the first time, it was incredible. But the twentieth time, it started to get wearying.”That’s the end of virtual reality and start of augmented reality. Virtual reality focuses on taking the user to the virtual world while augmented reality focuses on bringing the virtual world in the real world like with holograms.

Like the Oculus Rift, Magic Leap is another startup company currently working on the augmented reality. Seeing its future, Google took the lead in an astonishingly large $827 million investment in Magic Leap. Magic Leap came up with an idea to create something that doesn’t disrupt the way we normally see things as it wants to bring fun and games to the world we already are in. But it is an ongoing project and isn’t released in the market yet. According to tech adviser of Digi-capital, augmented reality is expected to become a $120 billion market by 2020.

Either way gamers have a bright future. They can enjoy both virtual as well as augmented reality. They can imagine playing Fifa like in live matches, play CS like they are in a battlefield, play Dota like they are in a virtual fantasy world.

The application of these realities isn’t just for gaming. We can chat with anyone like they are in front of us. We can stay in Nepal and see the world. We can stay anywhere and get live training sessions from MIT. There is endless possibility and a great future.