/ɔːɡˈmɛn.tɪd riˈæl.ɪ.ti/

Augmented reality

noun · technology

What it is

Augmented reality, usually shortened to AR, keeps the real world visible and adds a digital layer on top of it. This is different from virtual reality, which replaces the view entirely. On a phone or tablet the "real world" is the camera feed, and the digital layer is drawn over it so the two look joined. The device has to work out where the camera is pointing and how it is moving, then keep the added content in the right place as the view shifts.

For an artist, AR is the piece of technology that makes AR tracing possible: it is what lets a reference photo appear to sit flat on your real paper and stay there while you draw. Getting that overlay to hold steady depends on a few underlying capabilities — plane tracking to find the flat surface, homography to keep the image pinned to it, and sometimes occlusion so real objects hide the virtual ones correctly.

Etymology

The term "augmented reality" was coined by Boeing researcher Thomas Caudell in 1990 to describe a head-mounted display that overlaid wiring diagrams on a worker's view of an aircraft assembly.¹ The word "augment" comes from the Latin augere, "to increase" — the idea is that the real view is added to, not replaced. Ronald Azuma's 1997 survey gave the field its working definition: systems that combine real and virtual, are interactive in real time, and register in three dimensions.²

Examples in use

A furniture app shows a virtual sofa standing on your real living-room floor. A phone camera app labels the mountains on the horizon. For artists, AR arrived on ordinary phones when Apple released ARKit and Google released ARCore in 2017, both offering markerless tracking with no printed markers required. That is roughly when consumer AR tracing apps became practical. The Grid Maker Pro AR app uses this technology to lock a reference over real paper; the free web tool stays browser-only and needs no AR at all.