Virtual Reality

In VR (Virtual Reality), the user is completely immersed in a fully artificial digital environment. With the launch of the HTC Vive and Oculus Rift in April/March 2016, the end consumer (mainly gamers) finally got a usable and payable product.

Price range: $500 – $800 just for the headset and controllers. You need to have a hardcore gaming rig (>$2000), and you have to pay for every single app/game. Most of the games are bought on Steam

Augmented Reality

In AR (Augmented Reality), virtual objects are overlayed on top of the real-world environment. It’s already popular and well known on TV, especially in tennis, baseball or football. Most of the time, the overlays show historical, statistical, or informational data.

IKEA is already offering a cool mobile app where you can furnish your room completely with virtual IKEA products.

Last but not least: Snapchat. I think everybody has seen the popular puppy filter over Kylie Jenner’s face.

Price range: 0$! Yes, Zero. Almost everybody already has a smartphone in their pocket that supports augmented reality. Just download the app from the store, and there you go!

Mixed Reality

MR (Mixed Reality) is not just applying overlays. It anchors virtual objects to real-world objects, and the main use case is to interact directly with them. Additionally, the virtual objects also interact with the surroundings. For example, you could play a virtual chess game on your kitchen table and interact/move all chess pieces with your hands.

In one day, we created a very rough experimental app. The main goal was to learn new things and to have a lot of fun.

The Idea for an augmented reality insurance card was born. It uses an image target to identify an insurance card (yes, it won’t work on other cards) and projects 2D/3D data on it. To keep it simple, we reduced it to:

• Full Name
• Customer Number
• Social Insurance Number (in Switzerland we call it AHV number)
• Settled and Remaining Deductible
• Settled and Remaining Copayment

Vuforia is a big player in the AR market. You can use their software development kit (SDK) for mobile devices. It enables the creation of augmented reality applications. They offer many features in their library, so we decided to use image targets.

Unity is a cross-platform game engine developed by Unity Technologies. With the Unity Editor, we could create or import 3D models and integrate everything with the Vuforia SDK. From there, you can directly export it as an XCode Project and build it for the iPhone.