VR / AR / MR / XR, What are their real differences and why it’s important to know them

As expected, exciting and emerging technology has nurtured an fond and growing attachment to acronyms, and naturally virtual reality (VR) as well as augmented reality (AR), mixed reality (MR) and extended reality (XR) are not exceptions.

It’s very important to note these wonderful and exciting technologies come from many different places and their purpose is to do very different things.

Let’s look at the both the definitions and concepts within these words.

Virtual Reality (VR) is an immersive experience which is also called computer-simulated reality. It’s a computer technology that uses a reality headset to generate the realistic sounds, cool images and other wonderful sensations which can replicate a real environment or create an amazing imaginary world.

Virtual Reality (VR) is a reliable way to immerse a user in an entirely virtual world. A true VR environment will engage all five senses (taste, sight, smell, touch, sound), but it is important to say that this is not always possible. Right now! The market is very still excited about this tech and further progress is expected in the very near future.

Augmented Reality (AR) is a live, direct or indirect view of a physical, real-world environment whose elements are augmented (or supplemented) by computer-generated sensory input such as sound, video, graphics or GPS data.

With Augmented Reality (AR) existing on top of our own world it can provide as much freedom as you are given within your normal life.

AR utilizes our existing reality and adds to it utilizing a device. Currently, mobile and tablets are the most popular mediums of AR now, and through the camera, the apps put an overlay of digital content into the environment.

Now we are getting to one of my favorites, Mixed Reality (MR), sometimes also referred to as hybrid reality.

Mixed Reality (MR) is the merging of real and virtual worlds to produce new environments and visualizations where physical and digital objects co-exist and interact in real time.

This means placing new imagery within a real space in such a way the new imagery can interact, to an extent, with what is real in the physical world we know.

The key characteristic of MR is that the synthetic content and the real-world content can react to each other in real time. Truly amazing technology!

Finally, we have Extended Reality (XR).

Extended Reality (XR) is a newly added term to the dictionary of the technical words. For the time being, only a few people are aware of XR. Extended Reality refers to all real-and-virtual combined environments and human-machine interactions generated by computer technology and wearables.

Extended Reality includes all its descriptive forms like the Augmented Reality (AR), Virtual Reality (VR), Mixed Reality (MR).

In other words, XR can be defined as an umbrella, which brings all three Reality (AR, VR, MR) together under one term, leading to less public confusion. Extended reality provides a wide variety and vast number of levels in the Virtuality of partially sensor inputs to Immersive Virtuality.

To wrap up, the focus of VR is to immerse people into a completely virtual environment ; AR is focusing on creating an overlay of virtual content, but can’t interact with the environment; MR is focused on mixing of virtual reality and the reality, it creates virtual objects that can interact with the actual environment. XR brings all three Realities home (AR, VR, MR) tying them together under one term.