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Comment by brador | Hacker News Reader

Isn't VR just AR with the camera covered?

Not really. VR is an entire immersive environment to itself, it doesn't have to interact with reality.

AR has to blend in to the environment around, so it's a different class of problem. It has to locate points in the scene to add things to and project in a believable manner.

Turn off the lights. It's VR.

Not really, turn out the lights and you'll stop seeing AR at all.

VR will, for example, create a room with a table and put a chess game on that table. This all happens within the VR author's control and designs.

AR has to analyse the scene and find the table, find the angle the table is at relative to the eyes, compute the position and perspective of the table and the chess board to look correct on the table.

Both have the same end result - images projected to a user's eyes - but how they get there is quite different.

Hololens does not proxy the user's viewport through a camera, but the user is looking at the real world through a semitransparent visor, and contents are overlaid on that visor.

BTW, The viewport is quite narrow in the current version, but I have to say, tracking works REALLY well.

Flippant, but:

VR: Everything is in the computer

AR: The computer is in everything

I was about to disagree with you but then I realized you're right. Yes, exactly, VR is just AR with the camera covered. It's a subset of the AR challenge, which is much more difficult.

I'd flip it around. AR is VR where you're given an exogenously-generated background into which you have to integrate your elements. Said background owes you no duty to coöperate.

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