Before we jump into all the fun stuff, let's understand what augmented reality means. You would have probably seen the term "augmented reality" being used in a variety of contexts. So, we should understand the premise of augmented reality before we start discussing the implementation details. Augmented Reality refers to the superposition of computer-generated input such as imagery, sounds, graphics, and text on top of the real world.

Augmented reality tries to blur the line between what's real and what's computer-generated by seamlessly merging the information and enhancing what we see and feel. It is actually closely related to a concept called mediated reality where a computer modifies our view of the reality. As a result of this, the technology works by enhancing our current perception of reality. Now the challenge here is to make it look seamless to the user. It's easy to just overlay something on top of the input video, but we need to make it look like it is part of the video. The user should feel that the computer-generated input is closely following the real world. This is what we want to achieve when we build an augmented reality system.

Computer vision research in this context explores how we can apply computer-generated imagery to live video streams so that we can enhance the perception of the real world. Augmented reality technology has a wide variety of applications including, but not limited to, head-mounted displays, automobiles, data visualization, gaming, construction, and so on. Now that we have powerful smartphones and smarter machines, we can build high-end augmented reality applications with ease.