Welcome to XRShots, a 2-minute brief on Extended Reality affairs. We bring you simplified updates on what’s happening in the world of Metaverse.
The term XR was first coined in the 1960s when Charles Wyckoff filed a patent for his silver-halide XR film, intended for photographing extremely bright light events. Today, XR is understood as an Extended Reality. Simply put, XR encompasses technologies that enhance our real-world experience using digital graphics.
XR is not an independent technology in itself, but a combination of many different technologies. To further explain XR, let us first try to understand the terms Augmented Reality (AR), Virtual Reality (VR), and Mixed Reality (MR). AR, VR, and MR are basically jargons used as part of the blanket term XR.
Although, all of these shares overlapping technological features, each of these has a different purpose and underlying characteristics.
AR is something that enhances your physical world experience with the help of computer-generated graphics, giving a modified experience to your senses.
A common example is the Pokemon GO game and Snapchat filters.
VR is an artificial/ virtual world that is created using computer modeling and simulation that a user can experience by wearing a VR headset which allows them to experience responsive 3D environments.
On wearing a VR headset, we get a sense that they are on a different planet; a planet of motion graphics. It’s like watching a 3D movie, but as if we are inside the movie which also responds to our actions. Furthermore, everyone experiences it differently as per their actions and it gets updated in real-time according to the user’s viewpoint.
Similarly, Mixed Reality (MR) uses both aspects of AR as well as VR. MR blends the virtual world with the real-world allowing objects from both worlds to interact with each other.
All such experiences are considered to enhance our real-life experiences. Therefore, the term Extended Reality. XR takes the user’s experience of a digital device (such as a smartphone, tablet, or VR headset) into an enhanced version of the real world. XR could be either one of them or any possible combination in which they can be used. It also includes immersive technologies that are not created yet.
