Environmental Engineering Reference
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and/or augmented reality use then is to better understand the characteristics between the
two extremes of 3D virtual reality and real world reality with augmented reality spanning
the spectrum in between.
2.1 Virtual verses real environments
Milgram's Reality-Virtuality Continuum defined in 1994 describes a continuum that spans
space from the real environment into a pure virtual environment. In between those end
points there are spaces of augmented reality that are closer to the real environment and /or
augmented virtuality that are closer to the fully virtual environment (Milgram & Kishino,
1994). From the virtual reality perspective an environment is presented to the end user that
can either contain totally virtual (computer-generated) content or be somewhere in between
thereby containing relative levels of realism or actual existent artefacts not computer
generated.
There is a natural merging (see Figure 1) of the two concepts where the purely virtual
environment meets the natural or real environment. In essence, virtual reality evolves from
systematically-generated environmental content that is presented to the end-user and
gradually adds real world content while augmented reality (from an opposing perspective)
evolves from the real world and gradually infuses digital content into the end-users
presentation.
Fig. 1. Converging Realities: Real vs. Virtual
In a real environment we might have a live meeting with all the participants in the room in
the same place at the same time to discuss or work on some kind of business problem. Of
course this has become more and more impractical as people are geographically farther and
farther apart because of workforce globalization and decentralization. To respond to the
need to communicate across geographic boundaries we saw the introduction of technologies
like Skype, live meetings online, instant message usage or even some kinds of social
networking that involved either synchronous or asynchronous communications. The use of
these tools has now become ubiquitous in the workplace as businesses find one or more
combinations of these communications tools, which can be used to smooth and speed up
communication and business processes.
We have rapidly developed beyond even these latest technologies now and are seeing
rapidly evolving; newer ones emerge that include virtual reality and augmentation tools.
While these new virtual reality and augmentation tools, allow for more depth and
