One of the big market trends for the last 5-6 years has been a focus on VR, AR and Mixed Reality devices and applications. VR has been a topic in technology circles for decades and gained more prominence after technology scientist Jared Lanier began sharing his vision for VR starting in 1991.

VR got serious attention when Microsoft introduced their mixed reality HoloLens headset and even more attention when Oculus introduced their VR headset at CES in 2013. VR, as defined by Microsoft a few years earlier, was really a mixed reality concept, although the rhetoric around it focused on VR. But their goggles had a see-through feature that would allow you to look at a room you are in and see an aquarium and fish swimming around you. With that, the concept of mixed reality and AR started to gain more attention.

At WWDC in 2016, Apple made it clear that their focus would be on AR and introduced the first version of AR Kit. Since then Apple developers have created hundreds of AR apps, all being delivered on the iPhone and iPad.

These advances in VR, AR and mixed reality are quite important to the technology industry because, at its core, it represents a major revolution in the way we interact with computers.

If you are a science fiction buff, you know that beginning in the late 1800’s, science fiction novel protagonists often had fictional devices that they talked to that triggered them to do something. But by the mid-1940’s, when computers began to hit the scene, the only way we could talk to a computer was via keyboard input. In 1968, when “2001, A Space Odyssey”, had Hal speak to the characters, the concept of voice interaction with computers gained serious momentum.

While using voice to interact with a computer showed potential, the technology that actually advanced the way we worked with a computer came in the way of the mouse, when Xerox PARC researcher Doug Englebart, introduced the concept in 1964. Then when Apple used the mouse as a new way to interact with a computer when they introduced the Mac, computers got the next big step in the man-machine interface.