Immersive computing is a new term used to describe applications that provide an immersive experience for the user. This may come in the form of an augmented or virtual reality experience. While our attention in this book will be primarily focused on building an augmented reality experience, we will highlight techniques that can be used for VR as well. In order to better understand the spectrum of immersive computing, let's take a look at this diagram:
The preceding diagram illustrates how the level of immersion affects the user experience, with the left-hand side of the diagram representing more traditional applications with little or no immersion, and the right representing fully immersive virtual reality applications. For us, we will stay in the middle sweet spot and work on developing augmented reality applications. In the next section, we will be introduced to AR and ARCore in more detail.
