— Thank you for such a detailed reply. In one of your articles, you explained the difference between XR, AR, and VR. Could you tell our audience about it simply?
First of all, if I start providing that answer probably half of the people would disagree with me because if you asked three people for definitions then you will get at least four different definitions. What we realized a long time ago is that reality or virtuality continues and you can position everything between the real world and the virtual world. Everything in-between is called mixed reality. But there is augmented reality and augmented virtuality in-between. Of course, a lot of things have changed since that.
Then we have an XR term which is basically everything – AR, VR, or however you call it. And there are augmented virtualities which is a topic that's not very used quite often in everyday conversations. If you look at Google search requests, for example, it's basically close to zero. Sure, we all know what it means. But it's just certainly extended and disappeared from the everyday conversations. When we talk about mixed reality a lot of things have changed since the introduction of the Microsoft HoloLens device.
When Microsoft introduced the HoloLens device they tried to avoid augmented reality because people associate augmented AR devices and their variants with Google Glass. But they wanted to be different from that. They wanted to be perceived as something different. They used it to mix reality and explained it in a way that there is a mixed reality device is so great because it can do such a realistic integration of content in the real world. Basically what happened is people started associating the term Mixed Reality with a very powerful AR form. We're content that it’s not just really integrated. It looks realistically, there are multi-user AR, very intuitive interaction techniques. So what we mean here in theoretical terms it is a form of AR where content has a very high level of local presence.
Local presence means that the user perceives that the virtual content is actually there. And the opposite of that is something that we call assisted reality which is like text information. So you get a text with information asking to grab this product or get an email that's popping up or any other form of a note. It could be a text, a PDF, a video, or something like that. And that, of course, is also integrated into your perception of a real world but you don't believe that this content is actually there. You just know that there is artificial content there that assists you. We call this an assisted reality as a very simple form.
For VR it's basically the same! There are a lot of discussions. For example, is a 360-degree video a VR or not? Well, I don't think we can find an agreement on that within the industry. But in everyday language, we realized a lot of people would say that's a very simple form of VR content. And then we talked about VR. I think we should treat it as something separate and different.
In VR people are closed off from the real world. And, of course, not all VRs are the same. So again we see a kind of continuum arranging from very low levels of the art to very high levels. At a very low level, it could be something like 360-degree content. Of course, a lot of people could tell that 360 is not VR but there was a lot of discussion about that and whether 360-degree content is VR or not. We decided for us that it is a part of AR but at a very low level. Typically, it's 2D content that is smuggled in a three-dimensional way but now we’re dealing with people that associate it with VR. They say that it's a VR video on the Internet that says it is 360 degrees. And the opposite of a very simple form of VR is what we call a holistic reality, a holistic VR. That's something where people are in the world that's perceived as being actually there with a very high level of telepresence. While in the low-level VR which we call atomistic VR people always know that this is a fake world where they are in. And of course in holistic VR people catch VR content code with several senses. It's a separate Continuum!
Of course, from a technological perspective, you can ask developers why there are so many similarities between AR, and VR and how you develop the content. But on the other side, from a user perspective, being in an AR experience or in a VR experience is totally different. So do you feel it is different? I think when we talk from my discipline and from my research it makes much more sense to separate these two concepts - AR and VR - rather than presenting them on one Continuum.
And last but not least, the term XR is quite interesting. A lot of people say that XR means extended reality like a small anecdote but I wouldn't agree with that. If you translate the Extended Reality term to another language, you would probably get the same answer. Then if you translate Augmented Reality into another language then extended will basically mean augmented. But when we talk about extended reality, we also mean VR as part of that but in VR nothing is extended for it is replaced. So we would just call it XR but you will ask what X means. You could say that X is the variable X and you could place it wherever you want to – assistant, mixed, virtual, augmented, whatever. It's basically all new forms of new realities.