Medium post #1: Reality–virtuality continuum
reality-virtuality continuum:
VR: Virtual Reality. It can be created with synthetic content or real-world content.
AR: Augmented Reality. An overlay of computer generated content on the real world. The key note here is that the augmented content doesn’t recognize the physical objects within a real-world environment. In other words, the CG content and the real-world content are not able to respond to one another.
MR: Mixed Reality. It removes the boundaries between real and virtual interaction via occlusion. Occlusion means the computer-generated objects can be visibly obscured by objects in the physical environment — like a virtual robot scurrying under your coffee table.
XR: Extended Reality. An umbrella term that refers to all real-and-virtual environments generated by computer graphics and wearables. The ‘X’ in XR is simply a variable that can stand for any letter. XR is the umbrella category that covers all the various forms of computer-altered reality, including: Augmented Reality (AR), Mixed Reality (MR), and Virtual Reality (VR).
Summary: XR and MR are just umbrella terms for marketing usage and all virtual graphic environments. AR is creating an overlay of virtual content, but you can’t interact with the environment. MR is both virtual reality and the reality. It creates virtual objects that can interact with the actual environment. VR enables a person to interact with an artificial three-dimensional (3-D) visual or other sensory environment.
