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Blair M. Taylor, David Thrumston, and Andrew Max Derby
Interactive Technologies are constantly changing the way the world works, no matter what you use it for, be it entertainment, education, or in some distant business, technology reinvents many aspects of life. The term interactive technology describes many different types of digital media hence the technology. What makes these media interactive, is that they all respond to the user’s actions (Interactive Media). As one could imagine there are so many different types of interactive technologies, from the internet to video games and even into the future with augmented reality. The uses for these technologies are endless, and new uses and interactions are created each day.
In this section two types of interactive technologies are discussed, augmented reality and video games. Augmented reality as you will find out deals with casting a digital component on to the real world, this technology has been and will continue to be used with in many fields including medical, manufacturing, and education. We will also look at the various functions of video games.
Augmented Reality
Augmented Reality or AR for short, is an extension of virtual reality (Mind Commerce). Virtual Reality is a way of mimicking reality with technology, physically it’s a three-dimensional computer-generated environment (Virtual Reality Society). Augmented Reality is a way of added a virtual aspect to our day to day live. These additions are typically interactive platforms that are meant to enhance some aspect of life (Reality Technologies). These enhancements target our senses, for instance they can be used to improve how we see things. Augmented Reality is essentially overlaying a virtual component to the physical world and allows for further user interaction.
Augmented Reality has had a growing interest. This interest has many advantages that virtual reality does not. One of these advantages comes from the idea that developers do not need to spend as much time or effort working on AR as they do on VR because they do not need to develop the entire virtual scene (Mind Commerce). Another component of growing popularity of augmented reality has to do with data speeds becoming LTE. With cellphones now having LTE data this allows for greater speeds to perform tasks. This along with smartphones having global positioning software (GPS) and geomagnetic sensors, allows developers to interact with these aspects of new more interactive ways.
Education and Entertainment
“There is a desire for virtual reality in our culture that one can quite fairly characterize as a yearning” (Penny, Simon). This yearning for VR is almost and expectation for AR. Augmented Reality has and will become a great teaching tool across many different fields. Let’s begin with talking about entertainment. Augmented reality can be used throughout different media platforms, video games are one of the strongest examples here. A model app game that was quite popular happe