Difference Between Virtual Reality, Augmented Reality, Mixed Reality and Extended Reality

Nowadays when we talk about the emerging technologies them Augmented Reality (AR) and Virtual Reality (VR) certainly comes on the top and the related acronyms like AR, VR, MR (Mixed Reality) and XR (Extended Reality) need to be understood clearly before using them in any of our applications. You may be familiar with a few of these terms, such as AR and VR while XR and MR are still fresh terms for many. The purpose of this article is to clarify what is really behind each of these acronyms. You should note that these new technologies come from different places and they seek to do different things. Still, they can use some similar technologies. For example, AI and 3D object are important parts of all of them. Let’s look at these terms and the concepts and definitions under these words.

What is Virtual Reality (VR)?

VR has been an idea that was mostly science fiction, from movies like The Matrix to books like Snow Crash. However, VR has been in existence for so many years, since even before when some of the movies and books that made the concept popular. The ultimate goal of VR is true immersion i.e. the feeling that you are in another place without been physically there. Therefore, video game industry demanded VR technology first and gave birth to modern VR technology. Right now most video games are played using an input device like joysticks or keyboard and mouse. Actions in the game are communicated to the player through sound, monitor, controller vibration etc. That means any action the player wants to do must first translate into an intermediate step first, which breaks the immersion. In VR, the player controls the game directly using their head, hands and receives the visual and auditory information back through a VR headset. This VR headset provides a larger view than monitors. This means the player have direct control and feedback of digital world interaction. Hence the actions are more intuitive and direct.
VR is actually a hardware innovation and in conclusion we can say that virtual reality is an input and output device that provide intuitive control and deeper level immersion of digital experiences. VR is best used for storytelling and conveying experiences. After years of popularity in the gaming industry, we are now seeing this technology into more practical applications. The market and the industry are still excited about this technology trend and more progress and innovation is expected in the near future.

What is Augmented Reality (AR)?

Now let’s talk about augmented reality or AR. AR has already been used for years even before Pokemon Go made it popular. Actually, Facebook’s ability to tag your friends on photos, Instagram face filters, are all examples of AR applications. Unlike VR where you are bringing the user into a digital world, AR is used to bring digital information into the real world. Augmented Reality or AR is a live, direct or indirect view of a physical, real-world environment whose elements are augmented by computer generated sensory input such as sound, graphics, video or GPS data. AR provides as much freedom as you are given within your normal life. AR utilizes your existing reality and adds to it utilizing a device of some sort. Mobile and tablets are the most popular mediums of AR now.
AR is actually a software innovation. It depends heavily on machine learning and computer vision rather than hardware. The hardware required for AR have been already there i.e. a camera. Augmented reality is the ability for software to extract data from visual information of the real world.

What is Mixed Reality (MR)?

Mixed Reality or MR is referred to as hybrid reality as it is the merging of real and virtual worlds to produce new environments and visualizations where physical and digital objects co-exit and interact in real time. That means placing new imagery within a real space in such a way that the new imagery becomes able to interact with what is real in the physical world we know. The main characteristic of MR is that the synthetic content and the real-world content are able to react to reach other in real time.

What is Extended Reality (XR)?

Extended Reality or XR is a new term in the world of technical terms therefore only a few people are aware of XR now. 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 other forms like the Augmented Reality (AR), Virtual Reality (VR), Mixed Reality (MR). In simple words, XR can be defined as an umbrella, which brings all three Reality i.e. AR, VR and MR together under one term, leading to more clarity. Since past few years, we have been talking more about AR, VR and MR and it looks like in coming years we will speak more about XR.

Conclusion

As we have just discussed, VR is immersing people into a totally virtual environment while AR is creating an overlay of virtual content but it can’t interact with the environment. Talking about MR, it is a mixed of virtual reality and the augmented reality and it creates virtual objects that can interact with the actual environment. Finally, XR brings all the three realities i.e. AR, VR and MR, together under one heading.