Augmented reality. Virtual reality. Mixed reality. Assisted Reality. Diminished Reality. Extended Reality. What are all these "realities," and how will they impact you over the next few years? Have you been seeing terms like "augmented reality" or "virtual reality" thrown around in news articles lately?

With so many new technologies popping up every day, it can be hard to keep track of them all. But, unlike certain smart devices, these technologies might be in for the long haul, and that means you should probably know what they are. We'll break it down for you so you can walk away with all you need to know about both AR and VR.

What Is Extended Reality?

We've already talked about a lot of different modifications to "reality." All of these can be discussed together under the name "extended reality." This is often abbreviated to "XR." Depending on who you talk to, the "X" is a variable that can stand in for any of the other letters we're going to talk about, or the X can be short for "eXtended." The meaning doesn't change.

In general, an XR technology is any immersive environment where the display changes based on your orientation in a space. That space could be entirely digital as in virtual reality (VR) or your physical space as in assisted reality, augmented reality (AR), or mixed reality (MR).

What Is Virtual Reality?

VR essentially boils down to creating an entire virtual world that is navigated spatially, usually by a user represented by a virtual character can an avatar. With a VR headset on, your physical surroundings don't matter. Your vision is completely immersed in the virtual world, no matter which direction you look in, and with headphones on, your audio is completely in sync with that world too.

This created hazards in the earlier days of in-home VR as people would trip over furniture or walk into walls. Now, most experiences begin with drawing a "guardian boundary" around your safe play area that you can see in VR when you physically approach it. However, one problem that has yet to be solved is the motion sickness-like symptoms that some people get from being inside VR.

Related: Oculus Quest 2 Review: The Best VR Headset for Everyone

VR isn't as new a concept as you might think. It was pioneered as early as the 1960s for military training, and the first consumer products started to arrive in the 1990s. However, these devices were both large and expensive, with a limited catalog of experiences. The massive, limited, and expensive early VR devices saw some success in arcades, and you can still find VR arcades today.

VR technology is finally gaining mainstream attention thanks to increasingly powerful and affordable headsets with a growing catalog of games and applications. VIVE, Meta, and Sony PlayStation all have VR headsets on the market for under $1,000. VR isn't just for games and isn't just for consumers, mind you. High-end headsets are increasingly establishing themselves in enterprise and industry for virtual prototyping, remote collaboration, and other practical use cases. That's true of education and medicine as well.

Related: Oculus Go vs. Quest vs. Rift: Which VR Headset Do You Need?

What Is Augmented Reality?

AR refers to devices that combine elements of the real world with virtual aspects laid over it. That might be the identification of a plant, item, or foreign-language word thanks to computer recognition. Or, it could be the temperature of an object or the distance between two objects as measured by sensors on the device. Or, maybe it's just fun game characters that appear in our physical environments.

Right now, most of us experience AR by using our phone's camera to display the "real world" with a virtual overlay, though many are looking forward to smart glasses that will make this technology hands-free. When Google announced Glass back in 2012, the world didn't really know what to make of it. The device had limited abilities and applications, and it turned some users off to AR forever. However, the glasses have found a home in enterprise and more powerful and versatile devices are coming to consumer and enterprise markets alike.

The display technology and the network connectivity behind AR smart glasses have both advanced quite a ways since 2012, paving the way for devices more like the smart glasses that we see in films. It also doesn't help that Google Glass is arguably part of a niche category of XR that is easily mistaken for augmented reality. It's called "assisted reality."

What Is Assisted Reality?

Assisted reality puts digital displays in front of you, but those digital elements aren't placed in or over the physical environment. They're just in your line of sight. Again, if you had the opportunity to use Google Glass, they had a clock and notification center that you could see in the display, but this information wasn't gathered from or contextualized by the environment. It was just there.

This might sound pretty boring. And, compared to some of the other Rs, it is. But that doesn't make it useless. Assisted reality has a huge role in industry where it is largely used for remote assistance. The wearer can see a remote expert's live feed, and the remote expert can see the live video feed coming from the glasses. This allows the expert to literally see things from the wearer's point of view to give directions and advice.

What Is Diminished Reality?

Diminished reality is a kind of AR that uses computer vision to remove physical items from the display. It is probably the least recognized form of XR, although it might be more common than you would think. That's because, while DR is seldom the end goal of an experience, it is often an intermediate step.

For example, if you have ever seen an AR reconstruction of a historical sight, diminished reality was probably used to remove modern landscape features before AR was used to display historical features that may no longer be a part of the scenery. In this way, DR also has an important role in industries like architecture and engineering because it can be used to virtually clear elements before lifting a shovel.

Diminished reality is also increasingly being used in mobile phone cameras to enhance images by removing distractions from the backgrounds of photographs. Another way that you might have experienced DR without even knowing it.

What Is Mixed Reality?

Smack dab in the middle of AR and VR is mixed reality. MR is the newest of the three ideas and describes when a virtual environment interacts with a physical environment. This is different than AR, which only overlays virtual aspects. In MR, the virtual aspects actually interact with the physical space and physical objects. In a sense, you could argue that MR is a more advanced subset of AR.

For example, Microsoft's HoloLens display or the Magic Leap headset allows you to see holograms sitting on your table, floating in front of you, or held against a wall. MR relies on virtual interfaces blending seamlessly with your physical surroundings. It's not just an overlay like AR or a grown-up Zoom call like assisted reality. This requires advanced display and computing technology, so right now, most MR is priced out of consumer reach.

What Will the Future Hold for Extended Reality?

Recent developments are blurring the lines between these different views on Reality. At the Spring 2021 Microsoft Ignite event, a real-time volumetric video of Alex Kipman appeared in AltspaceVR, turning our understanding of AR on its head.

The words we use to describe things constantly change as we invent new things and old things fall out of use. Today, we're talking about AR, VR, and MR, but tomorrow, there might be something new entirely.