Did you get pranked on a fake snake filter? Or did that augmented reality car felt too real to disbelieve. AR has come a long way from its infancy. So why not dive into a history timeline for augmented reality. Here’s how it started.

1968: This is the year where we marked the first head mounted display gear. Ivan Sutherland, a computer scientist and a Harvard professor along with his student Bob Sproull designed the first AR and VR headset. This gear was actually heavy and needed to be suspended from the ceiling. It pictorially represents “the sword of Damocles”. And hence the gear was named metaphorically as “the sword of Damocles”.

1990: “Augmented Reality” this term was first coined by Tom Caudell in 1990. Tom, along with his colleague David Mizell, were asked to replace Boeing’s system of large plywood boards. These plywoods contained wiring instructions for every individual aircraft. Claudell and Mizell replaced it with a head mounted display for construction workers. This helped in viewing the cable positions through an eyewear. Now the workers could actually wear the custom wiring instructions instead of having different wiring boards for individual aircrafts.

1994: Julie Martin is the first writer and producer who introduced augmented reality in the form of an AR theatre. She titled it “Dancing in Cyberspace”. This included dancers and acrobats using body-sized virtual objects onto the same physical area.

2000: Hirokazu Kato created an open-source computer software library called the ARToolKit. This library helps create augmented reality applications and software programs. To get much stronger augmented reality, ARToolKit calculates real camera positions and then sets the positions for 3d view graphics accordingly.

2009: Esquire magazine was the first magazine in the print industry that represented augmented reality. Readers used software and a webcam to create an interactive content viewing with the pages.

2013: Volkswagen launched the MARTA ( Mobile Augmented Reality Technical Assistance) app, which completely changed the user experience. This app helped with detailed repair analysis with the help of AR maintenance tools. It helped give essential information on what repairs were to be done and what was supposed to be replaced. This app was also used to check out new designs and colors on cars.

2017: IKEA place app featured augmented reality furniture trials that were true to the scale and measurements of both the furniture and the room. The dilemma of measuring the sizes was long gone as the app slid in the picture.

This timeline above will be followed by much more interesting and thrilling discoveries. Did you know NFTs and AR are the new powerful duo the future will bring? Augmented NFTs will include features like ability to see digital or virtual objects in a setting or on a face/body. 3D NFTs with AR technology is the new revamp not only for industrial augmented reality but also for digital content and NFTs associated with them.