There are two ways in which one could define augmented realities. In 1994 two scientists Paul Milgram and Fumio Kishino described it as a continuum between the real environment and a virtual environment. In 1997, Ronald Azuma offered a better explanation. He says that augmented realities are a technology that will morph the natural environment around a subject or a viewer into the pure virtual world.

Simply put augmented realities are like playing a virtual game. You are all suited out in the virtual game viewer and race your car as if you are really at the Grand Prix. The virtuality stops right here in augmented realities. What is done with this path breaking technology is that the natural environment in which you are viewing a subject is completely replaced with a virtual environment suitable for the topic. So if a student is cramming on the working of the organs of the body, using augmented realities he will be able to do a walk- through of the different organs and whether it is day or night at which he is viewing this edutainment, the same conditions are created for him to see the working and the functioning of the organs. These will be highly interactive and you could find explanations to your answers in whichever format you choose to listen or view. Even better imagine addressing an audience and simple picking a rose out of thin air and waving it at them! Augmented realities let you do that.

With each passing year of the twenty first century, the world is taking one step closer to the ideas and concepts some of us have grown up reading in the science fiction of Isaac Asimov, Arthur C. Clarke and others. Augmented realities is that visionary advanced new age technology which has been around for a couple of years.

Scientists have researched this technology for decades every since we saw the development of virtual technology in the entertainment world. Augmented realities were the rightful heir to virtual reality, but this technology has far wider ramifications than its predecessor. Though quality research and the scope for application is vast, owners and developers of this technology have actually been slow in getting it off the ground. As applications of augmented realities require a lot of additional hardware and other operational restraints, augmented realities is waiting in the side wings, for its role one day on the centre stage.