On January 8th, the annual Consumer Electronics Show kicked off in Las Vegas. For the uninitiated, CES is a gathering of tech giants and innovators looking to show off their latest breakthroughs, gadgets, and dreams for the future to the world. It’s basically Candyland for tech nerds worldwide. If you’re following the extravaganza you’ll probably hear the acronyms VR, AR, MR, and XR thrown around pretty liberally. Most people will be familiar with the first and maybe the second one. Virtual reality and augmented reality have become relatively common place buzzwords. Mixed reality and extended reality, although they have been around for decades, are less prevalent on a consumer level. So, what’s the difference? Why do we need all these different (insert cool word’s initial here)R’s? Those in the know say soon we won’t, however, there is a distinction.
Virtual reality, in its current and most common application, refers to a computer-generated environment in which a person can be immersed. It can be complete fiction or simply a live stream of a concert that you watch/listen to by wearing VR goggles or a headset. True VR will allow users to experience the environment with all 5 senses, however, most of the time right now we settle for sight and sound.
Augmented reality has become more common in recent years. If you have ever played Pokemon Go or created an animated Bitmoji of yourself, you have used AR. AR uses a device to create digital content and layer it between you and the real world. This sounds like it potentially can be classified as VR, but an important distinction is that AR does not replace the real-world environment, it adds to it. A famously terrible venture into the AR market was made by Google in 2010 with the release of the Google Glass. It is basically a voice activated smart phone that was attached to a pair of glasses that had a tiny display visible through one of the lenses. It bombed due to its price, limited functionality, software glitches, and the creepiness factor (since anyone wearing one may be recording you without your knowledge). Future iterations could include not just voice interaction, but hand gesture and even eye movement control as well as a full heads up display extending across both lenses.
Mixed reality, aka hybrid reality, is very similar to AR except for one major difference: the digital projections must in some way react or interact with the real-world environment in real time. Mixed reality environments have been proposed as virtual workplaces where team members separated geographically can collaborate and interact with physical objects like robotics in the real world.
Finally, there is XR which has nothing to do with Apple deciding to toss those letters onto the end of its latest and greatest “smart” phone model (Are you a sheep or a shark? Guess which one would buy an iPhone?). XR, or extended reality, is becoming an umbrella term for any device that merges digital and physical realities. Whether it is just a marketing ploy to stop making us confused and afraid of all these different Rs, or the natural evolution of developing technology, you will be hearing this term more often.