Mixtive’s take on Mixed Reality

Virtual reality, Augmented reality and Mixed reality. Immersive technologies with fancy names that are extending our reality. Reading about recent development in tech, future trends in society or productivity opportunities within manufacturing, one simply come across these words. But making a clear distinction between Mixed Reality (MR), Augmented Reality (AR) and Virtual Reality (VR) is somewhat difficult and searching the internet for subsequent answers might be even harder. 

Understanding the concept of immersive technologies and their differences in depth could be like spending a large amount of money on a new OLED-TV. Satisfying for the moment but soon disappointing. Bigger, brighter and better TV:s enter the market at a rapid pace, just as immersive technologies shift in appearance, focus areas and foreseen future. So, let's check out the latest TV and the current status on immersive technologies.

 In order to understand the different technologies, we need the bigger picture.

All concepts with an arbitrary letter, let’s call it X, followed by R for reality, can be placed under an umbrella term: Extended Reality - XR. XR describes all immersive technologies, meaning how all technologies that help us experience the impossible by visualizing the possible works. These immersive technologies span over the spectrum between our real world and the virtual world:

Virtual Reality

Virtual Reality, is close to cultural literacy nowadays. It lets you walk on the moon, sing on the stage together with U2 and climb the pyramids, from your couch with just a headset. 

The technology has for many years been both praised and criticized, but pioneers have been pushing the technology since the beginning of this century, and still does. Applications exist within all sectors and the most mature one is argued to be within entertainment. The gaming experience with a VR-headset is drastically different from others. However, the big breakthrough and huge impact on society has only recently seen its progress, and mostly within healthcare, education and industry. VR technology used in education and training enables, among other things, interactive learning and understanding. 

When the American philosopher John Dewey expressed his fundamental view on learning in 1889 when he said: “Learn to do by knowing and to know by doing”. It could be interpreted as learning-by-doing, which is more relevant than ever before. VR enables for doctors’ to practise before meeting with patients, for distant individuals to conduct meetings in digital rooms and for young students to engage with virtually alive dinosaurs. VR is awesome and we do VR.

Augmented Reality

Augmented Reality exists close to our real world when adding digital elements onto it. The layer can be added and observed with commonly accessible devices such as smartphones and tablets with cameras but through glasses such as those produced by Nreal. Glasses or not, AR coopes with many of VR’s drawbacks in its prerequisites and high entry-barriers, both for developers and users. Consequently, AR has seen a high commercial interest and success. In fact, AR is bigger than what people realize due to its simple functionality with digital objects placed onto the real world. Pokemon Go, the mobile game passing 1 billion downloads in 2019, is the most recognized example of where the technology is put to use. Snapchat, the image and video messaging app, delivers over 4 billion snaps a day, many of which are sent with filters and yes, those filters are AR applied to your face. Cultivated from similar filters, applications can today be made for virtual try-ons for glasses, jewelry and soon also for clothing. You can more or less place any type of real-world object in your environment with help of AR and your phone. Any company or individual could be doing just like IKEA does with IKEA Place, enabling better understanding for products, buildings or places.

The technology ensuring ARs’ quality is making huge progress, a result of e.g. Apple’s ARkit 4 and Google’s ARcore. However, the big breakthrough for immersive experiences in commercial purposes can be assumed to rely heavily on accessibility and easiness. This could mean that you get instant access to the AR application when scanning a QR-code or clicking a button on the website, without downloading an application. This instant access is now enabled through web-AR, which we believe opens up the functionality of AR tremendously. Also, the development of better and more lightweight glasses, such as those from Nreal, that creates true mind blowing immersive experiences, will have great impact on the adoption amongst consumers. Not to mention the possible explosive adoption that could be expected if one were to believe any of the rumors that we soon might see a pair of AR glasses from Apple.

Mixed Reality

The definitions of Mixed Reality (MR) are both many and various, hence making it difficult to grasp. It can also be difficult to distinguish between MR and AR, since both technologies show a mix of the real world and virtual objects. An old and rather uncomplicated way of describing MR is by saying that it is a mix of AR and VR. Even though it is not explicitly correct, it gives us a base for understanding. MR not only overlays filters onto the real-world environment but also anchors virtual objects to the real world. It can be considered as an advanced form of Augmented Reality where the user can interact with the objects.

Differentiating MR and AR, we can look at two examples. Overlaying a filter with information such as road-guidance through the phone is a classic example of AR, meanwhile the use of an application like ARcall which anchors virtual objects that interact with its surroundings, and vice versa, is an example of MR. Mixed Reality can be experienced with just a smartphone but also with glasses such as Nreal’s, Microsoft’s Hololens 2 and Magic Leap's.

Confident? Confused? Convinced? 

Mixtive is interested in you,
in what the technology can do for you, 
and how we could cooperate together with you