Background

Augmented reality was invented by a cinematographer called Morton Heilig in 1957 by creating sensorama which delivered visuals, sounds, vibration and smell to the viewer.

In 1968 - Ivan Sutherland the American computer scientist
                Invented the head-mounted display as a kind of window into a virtual world
                Made the invention impractical for mass use

In 1975 - Myron Krueger, an American computer
                Developed the first “virtual reality” interface in the form of “Videoplace”
                Allowed its users to manipulate and interact with virtual objects and in real-time.

In 1980 - Steve Mann, a computational photography researcher
               Introduce wearable computing

In 1989 - virtual reality was coined by Jaron Lainer in 1989 and Thomas P Caudell of Boeing coined the phrase “augmented reality” in 1990.

The first properly functioning AR system was probably the one developed at USAF Armstrong’s Research Lab by Louis Rosenberg in 1992. This was called Virtual Fixtures and was an incredibly complex robotic system which was designed to compensate for the lack of high-speed 3D graphics processing power in the early 90s. It enabled the overlay of sensory information on a workspace to improve human productivity.

There were many other breakthroughs in augmented reality between here and today; the most notable of which include:

 In 2000 - Bruce Thomas developing an outdoor mobile AR game called ARQuake.

 In 2009 - ARToolkit (a design tool) being made available in Adobe Flash.

 In 2012 - Google announcing its open beta of Google Glass (a project with mixed successes).

 In 2015 - Microsoft announcing augmented reality support and their augmented reality headset HoloLens.