Why augmented reality? In today's world, we are flooded with vast amounts of information through 24/7 media, internet connectivity, and mobile devices. The problem is not whether we have enough information, but that we have too much. The challenge is how to filter, process, and use valuable information and ignore redundant, irrelevant, and incorrect information. This is explained by Schmalsteig and Hollerer in their book, Augmented Reality, Principles, and Practice (Addison Wesley, 2016):
"augmented reality holds the promise of creating direct, automatic, and actionable links between the physical world and electronic information. It provides a simple and immediate user interface to an electronically enhanced physical world. The immense potential of augmented reality as a paradigm-shifting user interface metaphor becomes apparent when we review the most recent few milestones in human-computer interaction: the emergence of the World Wide Web, the social web, and the mobile device revolution." - Augmented Reality, Principles and Practice, Schmalstieg & Mollerer
What kinds of applications can benefit from this? Well, just about every human endeavor that presently uses digital information of any kind. Here are a few examples that we will further illustrate as actual projects throughout this book.